Burking

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Burking is a term from US-American jurisprudence that describes a special form of killing by suffocation and has also found its way into forensic medicine . The term goes back to William Burke , a serial killer in Edinburgh in the early 19th century. He covered the eyes, mouth and nose of the victims of the series of killings known as the West Port murders while he sat astride their chest.

With this procedure, death occurs through asphyxia . There are relatively few signs of violent death. The killing method requires special care during the autopsy, since Burking tends to produce unspecific autopsy findings and is difficult to detect if the pathomechanism is not clear. Burke was particularly keen to sell the bodies to anatomical institutes in good condition .

The induction of near-suffocation by closing the mouth and nose is one of the increasingly common methods of torture . When used as a hand-to-hand combat technique, the victim is at risk of positional suffocation .

"Knee-on-stomach" position: The chest compression makes it very difficult for the victim to breathe.

In the breath-inhibiting “knee-on-stomach” position, the victim lies on his back. The executing person presses - with the help of their body weight - a knee on the chest and abdomen of the victim, so that they compress the upper body in order to massively restrict the vital capacity (lung volume) ( thorax compression), which leads to asphyxia .

In the "knee-on-chest" position, which is also breath-inhibiting, the victim lies on his stomach, his face pressed to the floor. The pressure on the upper body is applied to the back. The asphyxia also passes through the unterbundene ability to inhaled one.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Tabish v. State, 119 Nev. 293, 321 (Nev. 2003)
  2. ↑ Titlow v. Burt, 2010 US Dist. LEXIS 111459 (D. Mich. 2010)
  3. ↑ Burking Law and Legal Definition USLegal.com, accessed December 16, 2017
  4. ↑ Burking flexikon, DocCheck Medical Services, accessed on December 16, 2017
  5. ↑ J. Helmus, M. Poetsch, A. Freislederer, T. Bajanowski: Positional asphyxia in head-down position - case-related discussion forensic medicine, May 2, 2017
  6. ↑ Markus Rohrhofer: Trial after alleged suicide: "No suicide by a decent person" Der Standard , May 21, 2013
  7. ↑ Burking Law and Legal Definition USLegal.com, accessed December 16, 2017
  8. ^ Andreas Frewer, Holger Furtmayr, Kerstin Krása, Thomas Wenzel (eds.): Istanbul Protocol. Investigation and documentation of torture and human rights violations With 15 images. 2nd, expanded and revised edition 2015, p. 157