Homicide

Homicide is a very important topic to know well within the larger subject of Criminal Law on the MBE.  It's not too complicated but the questions tend to be very tricky.  A good start to breaking this topic down is to understand that there are three ways to commit homicide on the MBE: murder, voluntary manslaughter, and involuntary manslaughter.

Murder: Murder is the unlawful killing of a human being with malice aforethought.  And there are four ways to satisfy the element of malice aforethought:

--Intent to kill
--intent to inflict serious bodily injury
--reckless indifference to an unjustifiable risk to human life
--intent to commit a felony.

Intent to kill is the most straightforward.  But even if x does not intend to kill y, x can be charged with murder if x intended to inflict serious injury upon y and y ended up dying.  And not even that is necessary; x can instead just act recklessly and if y dies as a result of x's recklessness that too might be murder.  Or x might be committing a felony (bank robbery, for example) and in the process might negligently kill y. That would be murder as well even though negligence doesn't rise to the level of recklessness, but only because the negligence occurred during the commission of a felony.

Voluntary Manslaughter: Voluntary manslaughter is a killing that would be murder but for the existence of adequate provocation.  Provocation is adequate if it would cause a reasonable person to lose control, if the person does in fact lose control, and if there is not sufficient time between provocation and the killing for the person to cool off.

Notice that voluntary manslaughter still requires that you analyze murder. In other words, voluntary manlaughter = murder + adequate provocation.

Involuntary Manslaughter: 

A killing is involuntary manslaughter if it was committed with criminal negligence. Some states also have a rule similar to the felony-murder rule called the misdemeanor-manslaughter rule which will allow for a charge of involuntary manslaughter if the killing occurs during the commission of a misdemeanor.

Distinguishing between involuntary manslaughter and murder can be tricky. Murder allows for recklessness while involuntary manslaughter requires criminal negligence. This is a very fine line, though recklessness requires a higher degree of fault than does negligence. With recklessness a person acts with the knowledge that what they are doing is wrong, whereas with negligence that knowledge need not be present provided that a reasonable person would have known not to act.