Homicidal cut throat, showing single slash with no tentative cuts. Clean-cut edges with no sign of repetitive strokes, severing muscles, larynx, and some large vessels. No further info about this case. When an incised wound is longer than it is deep, it may be referred to as a ‘cut’ or ‘slash’, though a ‘cut’ may also be used by laypersons to describe a laceration.
Such slashes when inflicted by a knife, sword, razor, cleaver, parang, machete, panga, broken glass, or bottle, are typical of a fight, when the assailant strikes out with a swiping action, rather than the thrust of a stabbing attack. They are common in gang fights and bar-room brawls and the weapon may be swung at arm’s length in a horizontal arc so that if it contacts a body it will slice the skin and tissues as it passes by.
Fig.1 Homicidal cut throat, showing single slash with no tentative cuts.
They are also seen in suicidal injuries, usually on the wrist or throat. The characteristics of any given wound are a matter of chance and relative positions. The slash may be deeper at the entry end or the exit point, though it seems true that many such injuries tend to dig in near the point of first contact and become progressively more shallow as the wound approaches the distal end. There may be a superficial ‘tail’, a shallow scratch, running out of the termination of the slash, as the weapon rises out of the wound and is drawn across the skin surface before leaving the body altogether.
There is a tendency among advocates to visualize a fight as a static confrontation and to attempt to reconstruct events as if the two participants were standing still, the assailant merely moving his arm. This is an unrealistic interpretation, as all fights are dynamic, with constant relative movement of the bodies and limbs of both parties. Therefore any relative angles and depths of contact between the victim and the weapon can occur and overinterpretation and simplification should be avoided.
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