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In New York City, a gunman perched atop a water tower, opens fire with a .22 caliber rifle on the crowded streets below, randomly killing fifteen pedestrians. Peter Nicholas, a devout Catholic NYPD detective, climbs the tower to talk to the sniper. Before jumping to his death, the gunman tells Nicholas that "God told" him to commit the murders.
March 13, 2022. Lord, Let Me Die. Mercy for Those Tired of Living. Article by. Greg Morse. Staff writer, desiringGod.org. Subscribe. Apple Spotify. Over the years, I have talked with several Christians who have told me they wanted to die. They were of different ages and different ethnicities; they had different personalities and different reasons.
So no, I don't think you could say that it is legit for any single individual to claim that God commanded them to kill. On the contrary, one of the ten commandments is, "You shall not murder." (Exodus 20:13). The word that God uses for murder is different than the word that is used to mean "kill" when it is carried out in war.
If God came to me and said to murder someone, that's different than if I join the army and another human says to kill someone. – Richard.
Linda Ross Meyer, Unreasonable Revelations: God Told Me to Kill, 39 Pace L. Rev. 745 (2019) DOI: https://doi.org/10.58948/2331-3528.2002 Available at: https://digitalcommons.pace.edu/plr/vol39/iss2/6 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the School of Law at DigitalCommons@Pace. It has been
Abstract. This Article focuses on one extreme example of the law’s response to unreasonable revelations that is starkly presented in a series of unsettling murders: those involving criminal defendants who claim they committed their crime because God told them to do it—known as “deific decree” cases.
This article addresses the surprisingly many cases in which defendants claim that God commanded them to kill someone. This problem of “deific decree” murder is raised briefly in the Kadish et al. Criminal Law casebook, and one of the key cases, State v. Crenshaw, 98 Wash.2d 789 (1983), has become a familiar first-year puzzle in the context ...
