Definition
A term of medical jurisprudence denoting the wound made by a weapon or projectile on the side of the body where it exits, after having passed completely through the body or through any part of it. Exit wound evidence is relevant in forensic and evidentiary contexts to establish the trajectory, direction, and relative position of attacker and victim at the time of injury, and may bear on questions of manner of death, cause of death, and the credibility of competing accounts of a violent incident.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): A perforation of the skin caused by a projectile (such as a bullet) leaving the body.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Not separately defined; the term would have been understood by its component words in ordinary speech.
The gap between common and legal usage is narrow but not trivial. In common speech, exit wound is anatomical shorthand. In legal and medical-jurisprudence usage, it is a term of art anchoring forensic conclusions — about trajectory, range, weapon type, and relative positioning — that carry evidentiary weight in criminal prosecutions, civil wrongful death actions, and coroner proceedings. The legal significance lies not in the wound itself but in what the wound's characteristics permit an expert to infer.
Why It Matters in Research
Structural pattern: Straightforward single-meaning term with forensic evidentiary dimensions.
Exit wound appears in the Law Mind corpus almost exclusively in the context of medical jurisprudence — the branch of legal science concerned with the application of medical knowledge to questions of law. Researchers working with 19th- and early 20th-century sources should note that all historical dictionary entries trace back to a single secondary source: Beck's Medical Jurisprudence (2 Beck Med. Jur. 119), which served as the foundational treatise in this area. The definitional consistency across Black's, Bouvier's, Rapalje & Lawrence, and Burrill is therefore a function of shared sourcing rather than independent doctrinal development. Researchers should treat these entries as reflecting one authority's framing, not a broad common-law consensus.
In practice, exit wound evidence arises in three research contexts: (1) criminal cases involving assault, homicide, or weapons charges, where trajectory evidence may establish whether a shooting was consistent with self-defense, execution-style killing, or accidental discharge; (2) civil wrongful death or personal injury litigation, where causation and manner of injury are disputed; and (3) coroner's inquest records and autopsy reports, which are the primary documents generating this term in historical legal archives.
Researchers searching historical case law should be aware that the term may appear in expert testimony summaries, not in operative holdings, and that earlier sources (pre-20th century) may use circumlocutions such as "the wound of exit" or "the wound where the ball emerged" rather than the consolidated term exit wound. Modern forensic pathology has substantially enriched the evidentiary significance of exit wound characteristics — size, shape, beveling in bone, tissue displacement — in ways the historical dictionaries do not capture. Contemporary legal proceedings may engage far more technical expert testimony on this point than historical sources suggest.
Historical Dictionary Support
The five historical sources are in complete agreement and, as noted, trace to a common underlying authority in Beck's Medical Jurisprudence. Black's (both editions), Bouvier's, Rapalje & Lawrence, and Burrill all define exit wound functionally — the wound made by a weapon in coming out of the body — without elaboration on evidentiary application or forensic inference. None of the historical entries addresses the distinction between exit wounds caused by firearms versus other penetrating weapons, a distinction that becomes increasingly important in 20th-century forensic practice as ballistics evidence matures into its own subspecialty.
Bouvier's entry is notable for appearing immediately adjacent to the entry for EXITUS, a Latin term with several distinct legal meanings (children/offspring; export duty; issue in pleading; rents and profits of land). This adjacency is purely alphabetical and signals no doctrinal relationship, but researchers scanning Bouvier's pages should not conflate the two entries.
Historical sources are silent on what distinguishes an exit wound from an entrance wound for evidentiary purposes — a gap that reflects the state of forensic science at the time of drafting rather than any legal determination that the distinction was immaterial.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: Medical Jurisprudence; Forensic Evidence; Expert Testimony.