corpus delicti

Example Sentences

Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.

And there’s this one, a pioneering one in California criminal law: a crime even without a corpse, the body of evidence — the corpus delicti.

From Los Angeles Times • Feb. 21, 2026

So, every time you have some sort of a crime that’s committed, you have to have the corpus delicti, which is a Latin term for the body of the crime.

From Slate • Jul. 24, 2019

But in law, corpus delicti means not the body of a victim but the "body of the offense," i.e., evidence that the crime in question has been committed.

From Time Magazine Archive

In Worcester, undeterred by the impossibility of producing a corpus delicti, a district attorney sped a State detective to North Brookfield to investigate the 48-year-old death.

From Time Magazine Archive

Now, I read from Best on Presumptions, page 279: "The corpus delicti, the body of an offence, is the fact of its actually having been committed."

From The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Vol. 10 (of 12) Dresden Edition?Legal by Ingersoll, Robert Green