Brief Background
The Homicide Act 1957 gained Royal Assent on 21 March 1957 and is an Act of Parliament that helped to partially reform the offence of murder in the English common law.
Why was it introduced?
The Committee was created at a time when the English legal system was considering the creation of different degrees for murder. This was seen by the Committee as impractical and as such, they recommended changes to the law. Further to this, shortly after the recommendations were completed, there were a number of high profile and controversial cases. This included the case of Derek Bentley who was hung on the basis of a joint enterprise to commit murder despite it being his 16-year old friend who had killed a police-officer, whilst Bentley was actually under arrest. Two years later, Ruth Ellis was hung for killing her partner despite having a good case to raise diminished responsibility, a defence for murder which was not recognised at that time.
What was the aim of the Act?
The aim of the Act was multi-faceted. The first goal was to amend the doctrine of constructive malice. Constructive malice enabled the prosecution of a number of high-profile cases and had the potential to cause injustice. The introduction of the Act looked to redress this. Further to this, the aim of the Act was to address the defences that could be made available to those suffering from mental impairment during the course of an act or omission that caused the death of a victim and for those in suicide pacts.
What main changes did it make to the law?
Specifically, the Act abolished the doctrine of constructive malice. This doctrine found that the mental requirement to establish the offence of murder could be assigned to the defendant if the victim’s death was caused whilst another offence was being committed (e.g. robbery). Moreover, the Act also introduced defences to murder, which was seen as an increasingly necessary step in criminal law cases and would enable a murder charge to be reduced to a charge of manslaughter if they were proven as successful.
Key Sections
The Homicide Act, section 1 abolished the concept of constructive malice except in cases where the intention in the first crime was an intention to cause serious harm or to kill. This disrupted the chain of causation and required the jury to establish whether the defendant was guilty of causing the death of the victim. It should be noted that the Act did not abolish implied or express malice and therefore if this could be proven by the prosecution, they would still have grounds for the charge. This was confirmed by the case of DPP v Smith [1961].
The Homicide Act, section 2 created the partial defence of diminished responsibility. The recommendations put forward by the Royal Commission on Capital Punishment recognised that mental difficulties were quite common and would have an impact on a number of offences in the criminal law. The section now allows for the defence of diminished responsibility if the accused suffered from an ‘abnormality of the mind’ during the commissioning of his/her act or omission which resulted in the murder. Examples of this in case law have included battered woman syndrome seen in R v Ahluwalia [1992] and post-natal depression as we the case in R v Reynolds [1988]. This defence is not to be confused with the defence of insanity. The key difference between the two is that diminished responsibility requires a mental impairment arising from an abnormality of the mind whereas the defence of insanity requires the defendant to prove that there was a defect of reasoning which had arisen from a disease of the mind.
The Homicide Act, section 4 was created to show sympathy to those who had not died when trying to commit suicide as part of a suicide pact. A suicide pact can be defined as an agreement between two or more parties which allows for the death of all those individuals. It is considered that the trauma of such a pact was the equivalent to a life sentence and therefore murder was not a reasonable sentence. As a result, the Act states that where a person kills, or is a party to a death during the course of a suicide pact, the charge should be reduced to manslaughter. However, the burden of proof will lie with the defendant to prove that he/she had a ‘settled intention of dying’ and was, in fact, a party to the pact in question.
The Homicide Act, section 17 holds that the Act shall not extend to Northern Ireland.
2026 update
The Homicide Act 1957 remains an important statute in English criminal law, although several of its provisions have been amended by later legislation.
The Act originally introduced key reforms to the law of murder, including the abolition of constructive malice and the creation of partial defences that could reduce murder to manslaughter, most notably diminished responsibility and suicide pact.
However, the defence of diminished responsibility in section 2 was substantially revised by the Coroners and Justice Act 2009. The modern law now requires the defendant to show an abnormality of mental functioning arising from a recognised medical condition, which substantially impaired their ability to understand their conduct, form rational judgment, or exercise self-control.
In addition, the defence of provocation, which originally formed part of the homicide framework alongside the 1957 Act, was replaced by the statutory defence of loss of control under the Coroners and Justice Act 2009.
As a result, while parts of the Homicide Act 1957 remain in force, the modern law of homicide now operates through a combination of the 1957 Act and later reforms, particularly the Coroners and Justice Act 2009.
