THE LEDGER-STAR
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, July 11, 1994 TAG: 9407110111
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A3 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Medium: 64 lines
Eighty percent of murder victims are killed by acquaintances or members of their own family, according to a Justice Department study.
The ``Murder in Families'' study also found that husbands murder their wives more often than wives murder their husbands and parents are twice as likely to kill their children than the reverse.
The report, released Sunday, was based on more than 8,000 homicides in large urban counties where at least one murder defendant in the case went before a court in 1988.
It found that 16 percent of murder victims, 1,308 people, were members of the defendant's family. Of the remainder, 64 percent were murdered by someone they knew and 20 percent by strangers.
Husbands and wives were the family members most likely to be involved in family murders; they were victims or defendants in 41 percent of the cases, according to the study by the department's Bureau of Justice Statistics released Sunday.
When spouse murdered spouse, the husband was the assailant in almost two-thirds of the cases, the survey revealed. However, among black couples, wives killed their husbands at about the same rate as husbands killed wives - 47 percent of black spouse victims were husbands and 53 percent were wives.
Murders within the family tended to happen at night and in the home, the researchers found. About 48 percent of defendants in family murders had been drinking around the time of the crime, while one-third of the family murder victims had drunk alcohol.
When a mother killed her child, she was more likely to murder a son than a daughter: 64 percent killed sons, while 36 percent killed daughters, the study found.
But when a father killed his child, he was more likely to kill a daughter than a son: 52 percent daughters vs. 48 percent sons.
Sons were almost as likely to kill their mothers as their fathers. But when a daughter killed a parent, her victim was her father in 81 percent of the cases.
The study challenged the common criticism that the justice system treats family violence less seriously than violence among strangers or acquaintances.
``In several important respects, the criminal justice outcomes of family murder defendants were about the same overall as those of other murder defendants,'' the researchers wrote.
Firearms were used in 42 percent of family murders, less often than the 63 percent of all non-family murders, according to the study.
In murders of children under age 12, the victims' parents were the defendants 57 percent of the time. Seventy-nine percent of those youngsters had been previously abused by their assailant.
When the victims were age 60 or over, a son or daughter was the killer only 11 percent of the time.
The survey's information was drawn from prosecutors' records in the nation's 75 largest counties and was based on a representative sample of all murder cases disposed of in 1988.
KEYWORDS: MURDER
by CNB