Last week, a man was charged with mayhem. Manuel Jimenez, 27, of Springfield, slashed a man across the face with a broken bottle and was arrested this morning at around 1 a.m., a Republican report said.

But, like the melee, mayhem, as crime terminology, doesn't immediately seem on point with the actual act it describes. When we think of 'mayhem', we think the result of a riot, a group thing, - cars flipped over, dumpsters on fire, a dude enters a room, kicks in your stereo speakers, throws your TV down the stairs and flashes the "metal" sign and dives through your sliding-glass-door window, etc.

But mayhem's primary definition, to rather lamely cite Merriam Webster, is as such: a: willful and permanent deprivation of a bodily member resulting in the impairment of a person's fighting ability b: willful and permanent crippling, mutilation, or disfigurement of any part of the body.

I don't know why mayhem's secondary definition, "needless or willful damage or violence," is used more often than its primary definition. But the word descends partly from the Anglo-French maheimer and mahaigner, meaning, "to maim". So while mayhem typically invokes the crowd, more precisely, it seems to be focused on the individual.

And, legally, it seems, there's some overlap between mayhem and basic, run-of-the-mill assault. In the 45-50 Republican reports on mayhem over the last 20 years (among the ones I could find), mayhem seems to be the the topping off -- the particularly lurid flourish on top of an assault charge. Both mayhem and assault can both involve an attempt to hurt someone, possibly maim or kill them. But assault, in a sense, is a practical, old-fashioned attempt to inflict a practical, old-fashioned injury, or, at its most extreme, a practical but unsuccessful attempt to kill a person. Mayhem, it seems, is a bit more detailed, contemplated or morbid; often with intent not just to injure, but to maim or permanently scar or mess somebody up.

There are many different kinds of assault. Many different sections Massachusetts General Law are devoted to the crime. For the sake of distinguishing assault and mayhem, most sections in MGL don't really directly define what kind of injury constitutes assault. Massachusetts General Law Ch. 265, Section 39, which pertains to "assault and battery for purpose of intimidation" offers this definition of "bodily injury" after an assault:

Mayhem's definition, however, is a bit more detailed and cringe-inducing, and its punishment harsher. Mayhem is defined as such by Massachusetts General Law:





Of the 45-50 cases of mayhem the Republican has reported on over the last twenty years (at least that I could find in their archives), some have been almost cartoonishly violent. In 2004, a 20-year-old Holyoke man took a staple gun to his brother's eye. In 2000, Ed Jablonski, a sewage plant operator in Deerfield, was charged with "threatening to commit mayhem" after writing lewd letters to a local family's daughter; in one of those letters, he'd threatened to "throw acid on the daughter's face and that the father should have been castrated" (the mayhem-threat charges were dropped after Jablonski's resignation, Jablonski was sentenced to three years probation on reduced charges). In June this year, in Palmer, a woman was charged with mayhem after attacking a man with a knife and a frying pan.

Other mayhem cases have been downright mortifying. Most notably, in 1997, Frederick Perry and his cousin, Clinton Maynard received life sentences for the 1995 capturing and killing of Billy Paige. Particularly, then-22-year-old Bernardston resident Danny Nauman, a collaborator in Paige's torture, received a 6-10 year sentence for both assault and battery and mayhem. From a July, 1997 Republican article:

Paige, who was mildly mentally disabled, was eventually tortured to death, and the report states that "in December of 1994, Nauman held a butter knife over a gas stove flame at the Perry house and used it to burn Paige on his arm, neck, tongue and penis."

I'm really not sure how one can transition from that account. But mayhem, technically, is the right word for it.