The Difference between Homicide and Murder

There’s always mention of these two in a Pinoy pop - culture, especially infamous crime investigation reality shows like SOCO. You hear an attorney in Manila pronounce how the suspect will be charged with either homicide or murder for a certain killing but never really understand which kind of killing constitutes a murder and which kind a homicide. If you are looking back on said episode, take a closer look at the suspect’s…

Intent

One of the biggest factors that separate murder from homicide is intent. You know how, in movies, people whose lives are threatened by a killer maniac have that innate right to kill for the sake of protecting his own? Even as an audience, we want to see the killer be killed by the hero-victim.

We see the difference of intent in this situation: in one end, the killer’s intent is to purely kill and on the other, the hero-victim’s intent is to protect his life even if that should mean that he has to take a life to preserve his.

So how do we quantify intent?

Premeditation

Evident premeditation, to be precise. This means that the killer, prior to killing, has made the decision to kill. As with the term premeditation, the killing has been thought about in advanced such that there has been enough time for him to think about his actions and maybe re-think about actually going through killing the victim and still does so.

It’s the difference between walking in on your spouse with someone else in bed, then killing the spouse afterwards and knowing your spouse is seeing someone else and meticulously planning how you’ll dispose of the spouse so much that you’d try to make it “look like an accident” even. The prior can be categorized as a crime of passion, but that’s a different story.

Punishment

They also greatly differ in penalty with murder being a higher form of crime than homicide. Homicide is, according to the revised penal code, punishable by reclusion temporal or a minimum of 12 years and 1 day up to a maximum of 20 years. Murder on the other hand is punishable by “reclusion temporal in its maximum period to death” meaning that it shall be forcibly sentence that the perpetrator serve the full 20 years or a life sentence (“to death”; reclusion perpetua).

The next time SOCO or Imbestigador comes on TV, you’ll know how murder and homicide differ as well as reclusion temporal and perpetua. Here’s a challenge: look closely at the judges’ rulings—do you think that they are just when it comes to murder and homicide trials?