Judicial murder
Judicial murder is the intentional and premeditated killing of an innocent person by means of capital punishment;[2] therefore, it is a subset of wrongful execution. The Oxford English Dictionary describes it as "death inflicted by process of law, capital punishment, esp. considered to be unjust or cruel".[3] Judicial murder is not to be confused with judicial homicide, which may include the carrying out of capital punishment.
Example[edit]
An early case in which charges of judicial murder were raised was the Amboyna massacre in 1623, which caused a legal dispute between the English and Dutch governments over the conduct of a court in the Dutch East Indies that had ordered the execution of ten English men accused of treason. The dispute centered around differing interpretations of the legal jurisdiction of the court in question. The English believed that this court had not been competent to try and execute these EIC members, and so believed the executions to have been fundamentally illegal, thus constituting "judicial murder". The Dutch, on the other hand, believed the court to have been fundamentally competent, and wished to focus instead on misconduct of the particular judges in the court.
Show trials[edit]
The term is often applied to show trials that result in a death penalty, and has been applied to the deaths of Nikolai Bukharin,[7] Milada Horáková,[8] the eleven people executed after the Slánský trial[9][10] and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto.
In 1985 the West German Bundestag declared that the Nazi People's Court was an instrument of judicial murder.[11]