Not only have I heard of this phenomenon of a crow court, I've had the pleasure to see one. They are so focused on this that you have to run straight in among them to scatter them.
Suddenly it starts and all of them jump on one crow, picking at it until it is dead, literally tearing it to pieces.
There is some general squaking, but there is no clear target. I've seen it happen, and it is a brutal event. In Swedish, it's called "kråkriksdag", roughly translated as "crow parliament". I do know, however, that the behaviour of ganging up on one crow (which does not necessarily have to be the weakest) is real. I don't know about the origin of the word, but I would guess that since they tend to consider corpses edible and show up in great numbers around one, they also show up around a murder site. There were letters to Fortean Times a few years ago describing these events and someone said the following on the message board: It was long considered a piece of folklore, but these gatherings have been witnessed in recent years. The groups of crows that pass judgement on others of their kind are also known as a "parliament of crows". There are legends outside of the Germanic culture that relate to crows being judges over people as well, and how their appearance is an omen of death. If they decide against the "defendant" crow, then the rest of the flock swoops down on it and kills it. Another theory hearkens back to old folklore which told of groups of crows essentially holding court over members of their flock that had committed offenses. Survivors of wars have described how the battlefields were covered in black as crows (and ravens) came down to eat the dead. For instance, crows are scavengers and therefore often seen feeding on rotting bodies of various sorts. There are several theories as to how this particular term came about, but all of them have to do with the supposed behavior of crows. Murther is a variant of Middle English murthre 'murder,' though the th sound had begun to be replaced with a d around 1300 C.E. This more poetic term for a flock of crows can be traced back at least to the 15th century, when it was recorded as a murther of crowes.
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