Parricide

Parricide (Latin: parricida, killer of parents or another close relative) is defined as:

1. the act of murdering one's father (patricide), mother (matricide) or other close relative, but usually not children (infanticide).
2. the act of murdering a person (such as the ruler of one's country) who stands in a relationship resembling that of a father
3. a person who commits such an act

Various definitions exist for the term parricide, with the biggest discrepancy being whether or not the killing has to be defined as a murder (usually killing with malice aforethought) to qualify as a parricide.

Parricide is most often committed by a son against his father, and is associated with delusional thinking.

In pre-revolutionary France, cases of unintentional killings were still treated as parricides, with the accidental offenders facing the same harsh penalties intended for deliberate perpetrators of the crime.

Ancient Rome had a unique punishment for parricide, which is described at length in Steven Saylor's novel Roman Blood, based on one of Cicero's actual murder trials, the speech Pro Roscio Amerino. The felon was severely scourged then sewn into a stout leather bag with a dog, a snake, a rooster, and a monkey, and the bag was thrown into the river Tiber. Tacitus called it the "parricide's doom". Plutarch records that the old laws of Romulus had no penalty for parricide because it was considered a crime too evil ever to be committed.

Cases

• Lucius Hostius reportedly was the first parricide in Rome, sometime after the Second Punic War.

• In Japan, parricide once brought heavy punishment. Because of the Chiyo Aizawa case, however, the law was abolished.

• Sarah Marie Johnson was convicted of killing her parents in Idaho in 2003. This represents an extremely rare case of parricide committed by a daughter. As such, Johnson's arrest gained much attention. Parricide is typically committed by males. One recent study indicates that only four girls in the United States have been convicted of parricide in the last 24 years.

Parricide in literature

• Le Père Goriot by Balzac: "...so much for providing black veils for parricides, so much for sawdust, so much for pulleys and cord for the knife."

• The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky: "But it's not an ordinary case of murder, it's a case of parricide. That impresses men's minds, and to such a degree that the very triviality and incompleteness of the evidence becomes less trivial and less incomplete even to an unprejudiced mind."

• The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli: "[Oliverotto] was captured there, a year after his parricide, and together with his former mentor in prowess and villainy, strangled."

• The Stranger by Albert Camus: "He went so far as to hope that human justice would mete out punishment unflinchingly. But he wasn't afraid to say it: my callousness inspired in him a horror nearly greater than which he felt at the crime of parricide."

• Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy: "He moves north through small settlements and farms, working for day wages and found. He sees a parricide hanged in a crossroads hamlet and the man's friends run forward and pull his legs and he hangs dead from his rope while urine darkens his trousers."

• Le Dernier Jour d'un Condamné by Victor Hugo: "Jean Martin was the one who shot his father with a pistol as the old man was opening a window...it seemed to me as though the dungeon was full of men, strange men who carried their heads in their left hands, and held them by the mouth, because there was no hair upon them. Each raised his fist at me, the parricide excepted."

• Star Trek: Insurrection written by Rick Berman and Michael Piller: "You've brought the Federation into the middle of a blood feud, Admiral. The children have returned to expel their elders, just as they were once expelled. Except Ru'afo's need for revenge has now escalated to parricide."

• Macbeth by William Shakespeare: "We hear our bloody cousins are bestow'd / in England and in Ireland, not confessing/ Their cruel parricide, filling their hearers/ With strange invention."

• The Far Side of the World by Patrick O'Brian: "Mr. Consul Eliot and I arranged the neatest little parricide you can imagine, and I think I may promise a new and better disposed Dey at present."

• The Immaculate Conception by Gaetan Soucy: "Among them were parricides, the mentally retarded, vagrants, and abandoned children. It was a charitable institution, and democratic besides, in that all the residents were treated equally, the same punishments applied to all, from the murderer to the orphan."

• In the The 39 Clues series, Amy and Dan's relatives frequently try to kill other relatives just so they can get their hands on the 39 Clues.

• See also "On Hospitality" by Jacques Derrida

"The Martyr" by Herman Melville, verse 3, line 8: " . . . And the parricides remand; . . ."

External links

• Dictionary.com entry for parricide