Mariticide

Mariticide is the killing of one's own husband, formed from the Latin maritus, husband, and the -cide root shared with the atlas's other family-killing offenses; the killing of a wife is termed uxoricide, and current common-law usage sometimes extends mariticide to a gender-neutral sense covering the killing of a spouse of either sex. United States Centers for Disease Control data place mariticide at roughly 30 percent of spousal killings, and FBI data from the 1970s and 1980s found a ratio of about three mariticides for every four uxoricides. The term acquired its distinct analytical sense in 1828, when the English writer James Henry Lawrence, an advocate for abolishing indissoluble marriage, compiled and tabulated newspaper reports of spouses killed by their partners to argue that marital homicide was a consequence of the institution of marriage rather than of individual passion, a framing historians have since contrasted with the later concept of femicide, the killing of a woman because she is a woman. Documented cases span from the poisoning of the Seleucid king Antiochus II by his wife Laodice I around 246 BC to numerous twentieth and twenty-first century convictions; under English common law, mariticide was classified as petty treason and punishable by burning at the stake until the Treason Act 1790 altered the penalty.