Abstract
The text is dedicated to the case when the victim of a criminal act himself or herself motivated the offender to an attack in a decisive way, by having intentionally and cogently harmed him. The author deals with the depiction of so-called provoked slaughter in specialised works from the realm of criminology and criminal psychology.
The term provocation is used to indicate intentional behaviour of the victim prior to the commitment of a criminal act, which may be taken into account as extenuating circumstances and may eventually lead to assessment of the offender’s acting according to more lenient stipulations of the penal laws. Provocation expresses a certain proportion of moral culpability on the part of the victim in the interpersonal conflict resulting in a serious violent criminal act, and at the same time, this share in the culpability enables assessing the reaction of the offender more leniently from the perspective of the criminal law.