Murder and Serious Sexual Assault - Lancaster EPrints - Lancaster ...

MURDERERS AND SERIOUS SEXUAL OFFENDERS – A BRIEF DESCRIPTION
The types of previous convictions are now considered. Table 1 shows the number of
the 569 murderers who were convicted prior to their murder conviction at least
once for an offence of that type. It shows, for example, that almost 50 per cent of all
murderers were convicted at least once for theft at some time before they were
convicted of murder. When looking only at those murderers who have any kind of
previous conviction, this figure increases to just over 70 per cent. While these
figures are interesting on their own, they do not reveal a great deal. It is only when
comparing previous convictions of murderers to those of criminals who have not
murdered that something can be said about the significance of these offences in an
offender’s criminal history.
Table 1: Types of offence in the previous convictions of murderers (a)
% of murderers with
previous convictions for:
No. of murderers with previous convictions for: All Only those
murderers with prior
(n=569) (b) convictions
(n=387)
Violence against the person 219 38.5 56.6
Sexual offences 21 3.7 5.4
Burglary 234 41.1 60.5
Robbery 78 13.7 20.2
Theft and handling stolen goods 278 48.9 71.8
Fraud and forgery 83 14.6 21.4
Criminal damage 126 22.1 32.6
Drug offences 70 12.3 18.1
(a) An offender may have previous offences of more than one type, so may appear in the figures for
more than one row.
(b) Including those convicted murderers with no prior convictions.
Of the SSA cases, 379 (or 35.9% of the sample) had no previous convictions (see
Figure 4), and 604 offenders (57.1%) had two or fewer previous convictions
(including those who had no previous convictions). One offender had 41 previous
convictions before his first SSA.
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