In the manner of Raymond Chandler and James Ellroy, they cultivate doomy urban atmosphere and treat murder as a manifestation of a wider world.
Face it: We in the media treat murder in the District as a run-of-the-mill story unless it involves a "name," is particularly gruesome or occurs on a slow news day.
Groomed for stardom ever since she was a kid, she treated Murder Inc. as if it were her own personal Mickey Mouse Club; if she felt out of place, she never showed it.
In a tweet, the Washington DC-based Coalitoon to Stop Gun Violence branded Zimmerman "the poster boy for a degenerate gun culture that treats murder weapons as idols to be displayed with pride".
Headlines called them the Camelot couple, a sample of a familiar tendency by press and television to treat murder victims as paragons - helpful neighbors, brilliant students, with futures full of promise - a common sort of knee-jerk eulogizing that can be counted on to squeeze audience sympathy.
Lawyers in common law systems are familiar with such norms: murder may be a criminal offence (or slander may be a tort, or certain agreements may be enforceable as contracts…), not because any person or institution uttered a ruling that it should be so, but because the institutions of the legal system customarily treat murder as an offence.
Police said on Sunday that they were treating the murder of an Asian man near a mosque as a terrorist attack, and have arrested a man already being held over an alleged terror bombing campaign against Muslims.
An official at the Greek police headquarters, which itself became a target last month when a letter bomb killed the 52-year-old assistant to the public order minister, confirmed on Tuesday that the force was treating the murder of Mr. Giolias as a terrorist act.
Police in Pakistan have confirmed they are treating the murder of a couple from Glasgow as an honour killing.
The Millers' alleged slaying of two Las Vegas officers and a bystander will be treated as murder, without the hate attachment.
In some cases, abortions are already treated as murder.
