You're a transplant physician. A body's wheeled up to you, and you begin your procedure to retrieve the dead man's heart for some lucky recipient - OOP! He's alive! Well, he was. Pity he didn't wake up until after your incision in the aorta. What an awful way to go.

Have you committed murder? Of course not. You did not know he was alive, so you could not have formed the requisite intent that forms the basis of murder. Maybe you SHOULD have known. Maybe the nurse tried to bring your attention to his reactive pupils, but you blew her off. Well, that might be a crime indeed. Manslaughter perhaps, maybe negligent homicide, but it's not murder.

Oh, and by the way, the ancients did NOT sacrifice the deformed and unacceptable. They simply killed them - or at least some cultures did. For those cultures practicing some form of human sacrifice, if they had gone before their gods with an offering of someone who was deformed or unacceptable, they'd have brought one heck of a wicked curse down on their people, or so they believed.

Human sacrifices tended to fall into two categories: gifts and messengers. Sending a deformed human to the gods as a gift is akin to sacrificing an injured goat that's doomed to die anyway: it's no gift, it's an insult. The only reason you'd do it is if he was one of a large group, the population of a captured village or some such, in which case you're offering the gods ALL of your prize and not just the cast-offs.