The Cleared-Case Canon: Investigative Selection as a Structural Limit on General Homicide Theory Building
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Abstract
Offender-specific homicide knowledge becomes available through investigative and institutional records that represent only some homicide cases. Police records may describe an event, while offender-known, court, correctional, and forensic records may provide motive, offender history, and victim–offender information for narrower populations. This article develops the cleared-case canon as a label for the risk that evidence from such cases becomes a default basis for general homicide theory. The article uses a focused qualitative analysis of 44 purposively selected scholarly publications. It treats published research as secondary literature and distinguishes variable missingness from investigative selection and case flow. The analysis shows that these are different problems. Missingness concerns absent information within a defined dataset. Investigative selection concerns whether a case can produce offender-specific information at all. Case flow further narrows the populations represented by prosecution, conviction, correctional, and specialist records. The claim-scope check classifies claims as aligned when they name the observed population, qualified when they explain a bridge to a wider population, and mismatched when they generalize beyond their evidence. The article does not estimate selection effects or claim fixed differences between cleared and uncleared homicides. It proposes evidentiary congruence between the research gateway, represented population, and conclusion.
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