Definition
Patricide has two closely related meanings in legal usage:
1. The act of killing one's own father.
2. A person who has killed his or her father.
The term is both a label for the offense and a descriptor for the offender. In modern American criminal law, patricide is not typically codified as a distinct offense. It is prosecuted under general homicide statutes — murder or manslaughter — with the familial relationship functioning as a potential aggravating factor at sentencing rather than a separate crime. The term therefore operates primarily as a descriptive or classificatory label rather than a charge with independent elements.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): "One who has murdered their father."
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): "The murderer of his father. The crime of one who murders his father. Same as Parricide."
The legal and common definitions are closely aligned here, but the important gap is legal consequence: ordinary usage treats patricide as a simple description of who killed whom. Legal usage, historically and comparatively, attached dramatically different consequences to that relationship. Under Roman law, patricide was treated as a categorically distinct and extraordinarily aggravated offense. In modern common law systems, the killing of a father is prosecuted under general homicide law — the kinship relationship does not define the charge. Researchers who encounter the term in historical sources should not assume the offense carried the same weight it would in a modern criminal proceeding.
Common Confusion
Patricide and parricide are frequently used interchangeably, and historical legal dictionaries treat them as near-synonyms. They are not identical. Parricide is the broader term, historically encompassing the killing of any close relative — father, mother, grandparent, sibling, spouse, or in some formulations any person to whom the killer owed special familial duty. Patricide is specific to the killing of one's father. In Roman law, the distinction mattered acutely: the lex Pompeia de parricidiis enumerated specific relationships, and patricide was the paradigm case around which the broader category of parricide was built. In modern usage, parricide often subsumes patricide, and the terms are treated as interchangeable in many sources. Researchers should verify which term a historical source is using and whether it is being used precisely or loosely.
Why It Matters in Research
The primary research trap here is anachronism. Historical dictionary entries for patricide point immediately to Roman law, and for good reason: the offense was dramatically elaborated under Roman jurisprudence, culminating in the punishment of the culleus — the condemned was sewn into a leather sack with a dog, a rooster, a viper, and an ape, then thrown into the sea. That punishment reflects a legal and moral conception of patricide as a uniquely monstrous offense, attacking the foundations of the patria potestas system. Researchers working in Roman law sources will find patricide treated as a constitutional offense against the social order, not merely a homicide.
In common law development, this Roman elaboration did not carry over in the same structural way. English common law did not create a distinct crime of patricide. Blackstone treats parricide within the broader homicide framework. Researchers using common law sources from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries will find the term used descriptively rather than as a term of art with separate elements or penalties.
For researchers working in modern American law, patricide appears most often in three contexts: (1) sentencing enhancement arguments where the familial relationship aggravates culpability; (2) self-defense and battered child syndrome cases, where defendants who killed abusive fathers have litigated the scope of imminent threat requirements; and (3) inheritance and succession law, where a killer's right to inherit from the victim is barred under the slayer rule. The corpus connections between patricide, the slayer rule, and self-defense doctrine are more productive search paths for modern research than hunting for patricide as a standalone criminal charge.
Note also that Anderson's Dictionary of Law entry is corrupted — it appears to include text from an unrelated admiralty entry (Rule 45, seamen's exception). Researchers relying on that edition should verify the full entry independently.
Historical Dictionary Support
All five source dictionaries define patricide identically at their core: the killing of one's father, or the person who committed that act. Black's (both editions) and Rapalje & Lawrence each refer researchers to Sandars' edition of Justinian's Institutes for the Roman law treatment, which is the standard reference for the culleus punishment and the lex Pompeia framework. Bouvier and Rapalje both cross-reference PARRICIDE, signaling that the dictionaries treat patricide as a subset of the broader parricide category rather than a fully independent entry.
None of the historical dictionaries address common law treatment in any depth, which itself is instructive: the term had little independent doctrinal content in the Anglo-American tradition beyond its Roman law associations. Webster's 1913 equates patricide with parricide outright, reflecting the loose popular usage that legal dictionaries technically resist but do not always correct.
What historical sources miss entirely is the modern American context — the slayer rule, battered child defenses, and sentencing aggravation — which developed after these dictionaries were written.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: Homicide; Parricide; Slayer Rule