While watching the NCAA tournament, I sat through several replays of this Allstate commercial featuring an anthropomorphized mayhem. The advertisement, is one of a series featuring actor Dean Winters as the cause of all manner of “mayhem”.  Although mayhem in common parlance has come to refer to all manner of chaotic violence or destruction, that is not the legal meaning of the term in California.

Section 203 of the California Penal Code defines the offense of “mayhem” as follows:

Every person who unlawfully and maliciously deprives a human being of a member of his body, or disables, disfigures, or renders it useless, or cuts or disables the tongue, or puts out an eye, or slits the nose, ear, or lip, is guilty of mayhem.

This statute is over 100 years old, having been enacted in 1872 and amended in 1873-1874 to cover one who “cuts” rather than “cuts out” the tongue.  Originally in English common law, “mayhem” required an injury that reduced an individual’s ability to fight in combat.  Later statutes expanded the definition of mayhem to include disfiguring injuries.

“Lord’s noses, are even as our noses, and not of steel . . .”

The specificity of the reference to slitting the nose, ear, or lip can be traced to a 1670 debate in England’s Parliament about whether to lay an imposition on theaters.  An objection was raised that players were the King’s servants, and a part of his pleasures”.  To this, Sir John Coventry replied “the pleasures of the King lay among the men players or the women?”  These intemperate remarks engendered such offense that a band of King Charles II’s supporters waylaid Sir John as he made his way home.  The attackers cut Sir John’s nose to the bone so as “to teach him what respect he owed the King”.  Outraged by this violence against a member, Parliament enacted the Coventry Act making it a capital offense for a person maliciously and by lying in wait to, among other things, “put out an eye, slit the nose, cut off a nose or lip”.  See David Hume, The History of England, V, p. 148.