C) The killing must be malicious

light of modern criminal science, such a cause of death is no longer considered too remote for the law to trace” .

This is thus not a question of principle but a question of evidence. The difficulty of proof may often disappear before the nature of the fact.

In England, to constitute murder, death must follow within a year and a day. But in our law, when the intention was homicidal (contrast the section referring to bodily harm followed by death) no time limit is fixed after the injury within which death must ensue in order to sustain a charge of wilful homicide. This is in accordance with the laws of the continent and also in accordance with Scottish law and other Criminal Codes in other countries. Kenny considers that the limiting of the period was a wise precaution in view of the defectiveness of medical science in mediaeval times, hut now no longer justifiable having regard to the present advance of forensic medicine.

What is known as “killing by perjury”, i.e., causing an innocent man to be sentenced to death by false evidence, is not, in English law, murder. Yet, in “foro conscientiae” , it is as much so as killing with a sword. Indeed it is, perhaps, the worst and most heinous form of wilful homicide, which manifests more deliberate malice and aggravated guilt; and our law, as we saw in dealing with the crime of perjury, without classifying this atrocious offence under the head of wilful homicide, punishes it, nevertheless, as such, making an exception only where the sentence of death is not actually executed (Section 102).

(C) The killing must be malicious

The taking of human life to constitute wilful homicide, according to the definition of our law, must be “malicious” (doloso). This word here means no more than that the killing must be unlawful. It is not, in the context, employed in its original (and popular) meaning of ‘ill-will’ or ‘enmity’ , ‘spite’ and maliciousness to the person. In .... a man may be guilty of wilful homicide though, by mistake or accident, he may have killed a person whom he had no desire to harm at all: indeed, he may have been his own best friend. The word “maliciously” in the definition merely means an evil design in general, the consciousness of doing a wrong thing, and serves to mark off wilful homicide from other forms of homicide, which, though the intention be the same, i.e., to kill, are yet