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THE REFORM OF THE LAW OF HOMICIDE IN ISRAEL
and the straight jacket as to sentencing. Ihis critigue brought the Minister of
Justice (Prof. Daniel Friedman) in Mai 2007 to appoint a State Committee to
revise the law, which composed of Academics, the State Attorney s Office and the
Public Defender's Office.f The Committee submitted its report in august 2011?
and the proposed reform was adopted, with minor changes, by the Parliament in
January 2019.8
The main novelty of the reform is the transformation in the role of murder.
THE FORMER LAW
The former law contained 3 homicide offenses:
(1) Murder as the aggravated homicide, punished by a mandatory life sentence,
and defined as: (a) Killing the father, mother, grandfather or grandmother, with
the mental element of intention or recklessness in the form of indifference or
rashness.? (b) Killing with premeditation." (c) Killing during the perpetration
of an offense or the preparation to commit it or with purpose of enabling or
assisting the commission of another offense, or with purpose to escape from
punishment. The mental element for killing is intention or recklessness in the
form of indifference or rashness, and the other offense is any criminal offense,
i.e. felony, misdemeanor and even transgression." The former law included
the possibility of a mitigated sentence, for the cases of killing the abuser,
killing by a perpetrator suffering from mental disorder, and killing by little
deviation from the reasonableness of criminal law defenses. The crime and
the conviction remain murder, whereas the court has discretion to mitigate
the sentence.”
870/80 Ledai v. State of Israel, 35(1) P.D. 29 (1981); Crim. App. 647/85 Kesar v. State of Israel,
41(1) P.D. 347 (1987); Crim.App. 747/86 Eizman v. State of Israel, 42(3) P.D. 447 (1988)
6° Mordechai Kremnitzer was the Chair of the Committee.
7 See Report of The Committee on Examining The Elements of Homicide Offenses
(Amendment — Homicide Offenses) 2011 in Hebrew.
8 See Book of The Codes No. 2779, p. 230 from 10 January 2019.
° See below the text belongs to notes 24-25 on the definition of reckless-rashness.
1 Premeditation was defined in section 301 of the Penal Code as intention to cause death,
with preparation and without provocation.
The Case law and academia criticized the mental element of rashness, and the “other
offense” including misdemeanor and transgression; see Crim.App. 4711/03 Abu Zeid v.
State of Israel, (2009); Crim.App. 6062/11 Tamtaui v. State of Israel, (2015); Enker, Murder
During Committing an Offense.
See Khalid Ghanayim, The Reform of Homicide Offences: From Murder with Mitigated
Sentence to Homicide with Diminished Liability, 33 Bar-Ilan Law Studies 245 (2021) (in
Hebrew).
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