deodand

Sometimes grieving families could persuade authorities or juries to forgo a deodand, but often not, and generally the burden to avoid a deodand was on them.

Blackstone, Commentaries.18 When application of the deodand to religious or eleemosynary purposes ceased, and the deodand became a source of Crown revenue, the institution was justified as a penalty for carelessness.

The deodand required the forfeiture of any object responsible for a death—say, a knife, cart, or horse—to the Crown.

Really, it’s hard not to wonder whether some current civil forfeiture practices represent much less than a revival of the archaic common-law deodand.

Originally, the Crown was supposed to pass the deodand (literally, a thing given to God) onto the church 'as an expiation for the sou[l]' of the deceased.

In such case there is some analogy to the law of deodand by which a personal chattel that was the immediate cause of the death of any reasonable creature was forfeited.

Ultimately, the deodand’s appeal faded in England, and this Court has held that it 'did not become part of the common-law tradition of this country.' But has something not wholly unlike it gradually reemerged in our own lifetimes?

The value of the instrument was forfeited to the King, in the belief that the King would provide the money for Masses to be said for the good of the dead man's soul, or insure that the deodand was put to charitable uses.