Definition
A person who has committed a crime or offense, or who has been convicted of one. The term functions as a general descriptor for wrongdoers within the criminal sphere and does not attach to any specific offense or grade of criminality. In older English legal usage, it carried the more precise sense of a convicted criminal — one whose guilt had been formally established — though it was also used loosely to mean any offender, whether convicted or merely accused.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): A criminal or felon; more broadly, an evildoer.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): An evil doer; one who commits a crime; one subject to public prosecution and punishment. Also, historically, one who wrongs another without rising to criminal conduct.
The gap between common and legal usage here is narrow but worth noting. Webster's 1913 preserves an older, now obsolete sense — a person who injures another without necessarily committing a crime — that tracked the Latin root more closely than the legal definition did. Legal usage consistently required some criminal character, real or alleged. Researchers encountering the term in older non-legal texts should not assume a criminal context; in legal sources, that context is nearly always present.
Why It Matters in Research
Malefactor is a descriptive term, not a term of art with legal consequences attached. Researchers will encounter it in judicial opinions, statutes, and treatises as a rhetorical or classificatory word rather than as a defined legal category carrying specific rights or burdens. Its presence in a historical source tells you the author is speaking about criminals generally, not invoking a technical rule.
The more important research intelligence concerns the two Latin maxims historically attached to this term in the major dictionaries. Both Black's editions and Rapalje & Lawrence append the maxims immediately following the definition, creating an indexing pattern that researchers should recognize: looking up malefactor in historical digests may lead directly to these maxims, which carry independent legal weight.
The first maxim — Maleficia non debent remanere impunita; et impunitas continuum affectum tribuit delinquenti (4 Co. 45) — stands for the principle that wrongdoing must not go unpunished, because impunity emboldens the offender. It appeared in arguments about the necessity of criminal prosecution and in debates over pardons and executive clemency.
The second — Maleficia propositis distinguuntur (Jenk. Cent. 290) — addresses the distinction between evil acts and evil intentions, a foundational principle in criminal law's treatment of mens rea. This maxim is more analytically significant and will appear in sources dealing with intent, purpose, and the mental element of crime.
Burrill's entry is the most granular historically: it identifies the term as specifically rooted in old English law and cites Bracton and Fleta directly, signaling that researchers tracing the concept into medieval sources will find it there under Latin usage. The Bracton and Fleta references anchor the term in the thirteenth-century common law tradition, where it described an offender subject to criminal process.
Historical Dictionary Support
The four source dictionaries are in close agreement. All define malefactor as a person guilty of, or convicted of, a crime or offense. The variation is one of emphasis rather than substance.
Black's (both editions) leads with guilt or conviction and moves quickly to the attached Latin maxims, treating the definitional work as essentially complete in one sentence. Rapalje & Lawrence distinguishes between commission of a criminal offense and conviction — a small but useful clarification that the term was applied to both the accused and the adjudged guilty. Burrill's is the most historically detailed, grounding the term explicitly in old English law with citations to Bracton (fol. 104b) and Fleta (lib. 1, c. 20), and offering the fullest Latin genealogy.
None of the dictionaries treat malefactor as jurisdictionally variable or as carrying different meanings in equity versus law. It functions uniformly across the historical legal corpus as a general label for criminal wrongdoers.
What the historical dictionaries collectively miss is any engagement with the obsolete civil sense preserved in Webster's 1913 — the wrongdoer who injures another without criminal liability. That meaning had faded from legal relevance by the time these dictionaries were compiled.