Deodand
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Deodand is a thing forfeited or given to God, specifically, in law, an object or instrument which becomes forfeit because it has caused a person's death. In medieval Europe the object (or its equivalent value) was to pass directly to the church, or else to the Crown, ostensibly to be put to pious use. The word comes from the Latin Deo dandum which means to be given to God.
Because the item forefeit to the Crown could be assigned a monetary value, courts tended to pay more attention to this value - which would accrue to the authorities - than to the crime or accident in which it featured, or to the victim who suffered the consequences. Until 1846 in the United Kingdom, the proceeds of selling the item might be used as compensation for the relatives of the victim.
On Christmas Eve 1841 in an accident on the Great Western Railway a train ran into a landslip in Sonning Cutting and eight passengers were killed; the inquest jury assigned a deodand value of £1000 to the train. The Board of Trade inspector exonerated the Company from blame, and the damages were reduced to a nominal sum. The case highlighted the problems of applying medieval law to the developing commercial society, and forfeiture of deodands was abolished in the UK by the Fatal Accidents Act of 1846 (usually referred to as Lord Campbell's Act).
Some U.S. state constitutions ban deodands, frequently in the same article that bans corruption of blood.
[edit] Other uses
There is also a creature called the Deodand which appears repeatedly in Jack Vance's popular Dying Earth series. It is carnivorous, malicious, and sentient, and is described by Vance as "formed and featured like a handsome man, finely muscled, but with a dead black lusterless skin and long slit eyes". Within the books the wizard Follinense, in "his bizarre systemology," classifies it as a hybrid of "wolverine, basilisk, man."
