In cold blood

This is a phrase often used in TV, movies, novels and courts of law, but what does it mean?  Certainly no mammal has cold blood, they are all warmblooded.  This is an established fact only reptiles are cold blooded.
If you ask around you will see that lots of people are not certain what the phrase is.  Even the dictionaries differ in meaning.

The lexicon definition is 'dispassionate', the commission of murder without emotion or some other subjective descriptor.  Various historical records are offered to xplain the origin, one xplanation is; people thought that when one was angry their blood would boil, followed by the calm: cold blood.

I personally think it is gibberish.  Beyond this it is open to interpretation.  So it will take the meaning each person believes is accurate .... if this confusion describes any jury, then a mistrial is in order.  The phrase has no place in the courtroom and it is nothing but a ploy by the prosecution who wants a guilty verdict.

He murdered the victim in cold blood.  The man is on trial for murder and not how he accomplished the task.  Oh I agree that a person can be killed slowly and made to suffer unspeakable torture but once he dies, there is no suffering, no torture.  And the fact is that he is on trial for murder, and not for torture.  This offering of prose to the jury gives them a false sense of propriety, murder is a capital crime.  Because it is a capital crime, the fact that the victims murder is agonizing to the family members is not relevant, it is illegal to murder people, cold blood not withstanding.  If the murderer stabbed the victim 100 times, but he was dead after the first stab, he was not tortured.  The body was desecrated, but he is not on trial for this.

The lawyer does not have freedom of speech, he cant say the man was tortured, and suffered, unless the evidence confirms the event.  If he does he has misrepresented the facts.

To allow the family members to address the criminal is political show, because it isnt about the family, its about the state.  When a soldier goes temporarily insane and kills women and children, there is no state, it is not a capital crime.  It is a crime under the UCMJ, the code of military justice.

The man, is taught to kill, sent to a war zone, in a battlefield far, far, away.  The soldier sees his comrades in arms get killed by the enemy, he sustains wounds and his commanders are to busy to award him his purple heart.  He suffers a close head injury, massive trauma caused by an xplosive device and develops PTSD, and again no metals are conferred. Then when the Army needs a soldier, they claim to have treated the soldier and cured him.  So he is sent back to the nightmare with a neurotic preoccupation of hurting the enemy for hurting his friends.

But Politics trump justice, the Afgans want justice and even though they dont have a penal code, they dont have separation of church and state, but that soldier is the path of least resistance.  Im sure the prosecutor will say he did it in cold blood.