CRIME BY THE ELDERLY

The elderly offender poses a different set of problems and issues for police, prosecutors, and trial judges from those associated with both youth offenders and younger adult offenders. This research examines the problems and issues posed by the elderly offender. An important definition for this research is the term "elderly." Most definitions of the term are either or both arbitrary and subjective. Further, while a specific definition of elderly may be appropriate for one analytical parameter, that same definition may be quite inappropriate for another analytical parameter. For purposes of this research, age 55 and over is considered to be elderly (Fattah & Sacco, 1990, pp. 19-20).

While as a group older persons tend to commit less crime on a per capita basis than do their younger counterparts, they tend to "commit their individual crimes for the same reasons that other adults do: . . . lack of commitment to conforming norms, lack of alternatives, need for excitement, or mental aberrations (Alston, 1986, p. 156). Psychiatric explanations for criminal behavior by elderly persons can create problem situations for the police (Fattah & Sacco, pp. 93-94).

As the population ages, more law enforcement agencies are focusing on senior citizens (Petrunik, 1991, pp. 207-208). Police have begun to change their approach to dealing with two different types o

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typically involves elderly men who have either poor health, ailing spouses, or both, who shoot their wives and then commit or attempt to suicide (Marzuk, Tardiff, & Hirsch, pp. 3179-3183). Often, suicide notes describe the inability of one or both partners to cope with declining health or loneliness, or inform the family of wills, burial plots, and insurance. These cases resemble "mercy killings" or simple suicide pacts among the elderly in which both individuals, usually by poisoning themselves, are certified as suicides. These offenders also resemble the profile of the "elderly white male suicide," who is usually widowed or separated, depressed, and in poor health and despair. Prosecutors must consider whether murder-suicide more closely resembles a suicide with a homicidal component or a homicide with a suicidal component. Several lines of evidence suggest that these events occupy a distinct epidemiological domain that displays similarities to and differences from both types of violence (Marzuk, Tardiff, & Hirsch, pp. 3179-3183). First, the short time span, often minutes, between the murder and suicide suggests that neither act is "incidental" to the other. That is, it is unlikely that murder-suicide is primarily a hom
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Approximate Word count = 6672
Approximate Pages = 27 (250 words per page)

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