Is Killing Wrong?: A Study in Pure Sociology

8. The Relational Dimension

o, my offense is rank, it smells to heaven, It hath the primal eldest curse upon’t, a brother’s murder. The speaker of these lines is Claudius, brother and murderer of the king of Denmark in Shakespeare’s classic play, Hamlet. In a moment of clarity, Claudius is struck by the affinities of his act with the biblical slaying of abel by Cain. Suddenly, he understands the sheer evil of what he has done. He has not just taken a life; he has murdered a kinsman, a family member, a brother. His is not just an offense, but the very worst kind of iniquity, so putrid it stinks to Heaven itself. Claudius’s insight uncovers a common, perhaps even universal, view of homicide: to kill is wrong, but to kill a family member is an even graver violation of the moral order. Medieval England was certainly not the only society in which “all right-thinking men naturally viewed with profound revulsion violence within the kindred” (Hyams 2003: 203). The Bedouin of north africa liken a man who kills a member of his own family to an animal, “for no human being would do this,” and they call him “one who ‘defecates in the tent’” (Peters 1967: 264). The Lugbara of Uganda regard the killing of a family member as unthinkable and unnatural, a sin of the gravest magnitude that no decent person would commit (Middleton 1965: 512). In the albanian highlands, “a son unnatural enough to kill his own father could surely not have been born by that father, but must be a bastard” (Hasluck 1954: 211). although people are unusually shocked and horrified by intimate killing, Black makes a bold prediction: they handle it leniently (1976: 41). 8 THE RELATIONAL DIMENSION the relational dimension 157 LAW Intimacy or “relational distance,” a component of the morphological dimension of social space, is the degree to which people participate in one another’s lives. Measures of relational distance include “the scope, frequency, and length of interaction between people, the age of their relationship, and the nature and number of links between them in a social network” (Black 1976: 41). Spouses and siblings occupy the intimate end of the spectrum; strangers, the distant end. relational distance predicts the behavior of law and of popular justice (Black 1976; 1993). Black proposes that law and relational distance are related in curvilinear fashion (1976: 41). Thus, little or no law is found between intimates. as relational distance increases, so too does the amount of law. Law therefore becomes more active in conflicts between distant acquaintances and strangers. However, as relational distance increases to the point that people live in wholly different worlds, law tails off. as with cultural distance, the last part of the curve only applies today across societies.1 Within modern societies , law generally increases with relational distance (Black 1989: 110, note 71). houSton The tendency of intimate relationships to repel law was first demonstrated in american homicide cases in a Houston, Texas, study, published at about the same time as The Behavior of Law (Lundsgaarde 1977). The demonstration is all the more cogent since the author does not appear to have been aware of Black’s theory (1995: 843). yet the link between intimacy and leniency turned out to be the central finding of the study. The study analyzed the handling of all homicides coming to the attention of the Houston police in 1969. That year the city had 176 homicides judged to be criminal in which the relationship between killer and victim was known and in which the offender’s case had been legally resolved.2 of those, only 40 percent (73) resulted in legal punishment; the remainder were dismissed by the grand jury (also known as “no billed”), were dropped by the prosecutor, or resulted in an acquittal or probation. Intimate cases, he found, were particularly 158 Is Killing Wrong? likely to escape punishment: the “severity of the penalty for killers correlates inversely with the degree of intimacy between killer and victim. Thus, 61 percent of killers of relatives escaped any form of legal penalty; 53 percent of killers of friends or associates similarly escaped any form of legal penalty, and 36 percent of killers of strangers escaped legal punishment” (Lundsgaarde 1977: 16). When punishment was imposed, its severity varied inversely with the parties’ intimacy. Five cases attracted the most severe penalty— death; all were stranger killings. Seven...