Parricide or patricide, in its proper meaning, is a homicide committed by someone against the persons of his father or mother, grandfather or grandmother, or other ancestors.

Any homicide committed against the persons of those who take the place of our father and mother, such as uncles and aunts, great uncles, and great aunts, is also called parricide .

Any attack against the person of the king is similarly qualified as parricide because the sovereign is regarded as the father of his people.

Finally, also included in the term parricide is any homicide committed against the persons of children, grand-children and other direct descendants, and generally of those to whom we are so closely bound by bloodlines or affinity such that homicide [of them] is more unnatural, as when it is committed on the persons of a brother or sister, father-in-law or mother-in-law, son-in-law or daughter-in-law, godfather or godmother, god-son, or god-daughter, step-father or stepmother, stepson or stepdaughter.

When asked why he had pronounced no penalty at all against parricides , Solon said that he did not believe that anyone could be capable of committing such an enormous crime.

However, other Greek and Roman legislators recognized that there are only too many unnatural people capable of the most heinous crimes.

Caracala, having killed his brother Geta in the arms of his mother Julie, wanted to have his crime justified by Papinien, but that great jurist replied that it was easier to commit a parricide than to excuse one.

According to the law pompeia , recorded in the 9 ff. ad leg. pompeiam , and in the unique law under the code de lus qui parentes vel liberos occiderunt [Concerning those who killed their children or parents], he who was convicted of the crime of parricide was first whipped until blood flowed, and afterward closed up in a leather sack with a dog, a monkey, a cock, and a poisonous snake, and in this state thrown into the sea or into the nearest river. The law, giving the reason for this kind of torture, said that the parricide who has offended nature by his crime might be deprived of the use of all the elements, namely, of air while still alive; of water while in the middle of the sea or a river; and of the earth which he cannot have for his grave.

Among us, this crime is punished by the worst torture, and the rigor of the penalty is increased according to the circumstances and the quality of the person against whom the crime was committed; thus parricide committed against the person of the king, which is the most detestable of all crimes of this type, is also punished with the most rigorous torments. See Leze-majesté.

Only a furor which stems from mental derangement can excuse a parricide ; in this case, it is always ordered that the author of the parricide will be locked up and guarded in the care of his relations.

The son who commits parricide is excluded from his father's inheritance, given the unworthiness that he incurred at the moment of his crime.

However, the children of the son who commits parricide are not excluded from their grandfather's inheritance.

The crime of parricide is covered, as others, by a twenty-year statute of limitations and by a thirty-year statute of limitations when judgment in absentia has been carried out in effigy. See Desmaisons and Jovet, and the articles Crime, Child.

The most delicate question that one might ask on this matter, and for which I promised a solution under the heading Self-Defense, is whether a son who kills his father or his mother in self defense is guilty of parricide ?

I note first that laws can, because of their limitations, [indiscriminately] punish all sons who kill their fathers or mothers, even in self defense. In fact, as it must be assumed that such a case will be very rare, it is not appropriate to make an exception for it since it might result in leaving a true parricide unpunished. Consider the thing in itself. Here's the opinion of M. Barbeyrac:

1. If a father is driven to kill his son by an emotion of which he is not the master, such that he does not know what he is doing, it is still better [for the son] to let himself be killed then, than to dip his hands into his father's blood.
2. When a son has some reason to fear that a father might act with such cognizance and such premeditation so as to put his life in danger, there is nothing that he must not do in order to avoid the least occasion of angering his father, and it is necessary to abstain from many things that he would have full right to carry out if it were a question of any other person.
3. But if after having neglected nothing on that score, a son saw himself infallibly exposed to losing his life by the hand of the one who, more than anyone, is bound to contribute to his child's conservation, as in the earlier case, he can, if he wants, let himself be killed through an excess of tenderness and consideration for the one who fathered him. But I also do not think that he would be guilty of murder and of parricide , if he were defending himself even as far as to kill the aggressor.

The right to defend one's life comes before any obligations towards another; and a father who forgets himself so far as to enter into such a great excess of anger against his own son scarcely deserves that the latter still consider him as his father. The innocent son is then well-worthy of compassion, since while the father gives evidence of having renounced natural feelings, the son cannot himself, without a great repugnance, follow on that occasion the natural inclination that would otherwise lead him to defend himself. Thus this case will happen very rarely; and a son, unless he is as unnatural as his father, will defend himself only weakly, when he sees that the defense can only be fatal to the aggressor whom he would like to save, although unworthy. But finally, it suffices that the thing might be possible: and thus the question must not be omitted on the pretext that the decision can be abused nor decided on those striking prejudices that the relationship of father and son constitute. The duties that are born of this relationship are reciprocal, and if the balance is stronger on one side than the other, it must not fall all on that side.

The principles of natural law, well-examined, will always furnish in the rarest and thorniest cases, as this one, the wherewithal to mark the just limits of each duty and to conciliate those who seem to offend each other.

For the rest, curious readers can consult further Gundling, Jus nat . Werner, Differt. jus. nat . Gribner, Jurisp. nat. Voet, in Pandectas, etc . They have, even most of them, upheld the affirmative purely and simply, without the precautions and restrictions that we established at the outset. There is in Sophocles a passage that Grotius did not forget in his Excerpta ex veter. com. & trag. Oedipus is made to say that even if he had known his father, when he killed him in self defense, he could not be considered guilty.