Concurrence of Actus Reus and Mens Rea PDF

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Concurrence of Actus Reus and Mens Rea As a general rule, the actus reus and mens rea of a crime must coincide in time. That is, the behavioural and circumstantial elements of the actus reus must occur at the same time as the mens rea requirements are satisfied. Unless there is a moment in time, a scintilla temporis, at which these elements are all present, the crime is not committed. Consider the following illustration: D is an assassin who has been hired to kill V. one evening she drives over V’s house in order to shoot him. One the way she is involved in an accident when she collides with cyclist who has suddenly cut in front of her car. Upon getting our of the car, D recognises that the cyclist is V. thinking V is unconscious but alive, she shoots him through the heart. V was already dead. D has not murdered V. although she may have caused his death (actus reus) by driving into him, when she did so she did not have a present intention to kill. Later when she shot V, she had the mens rea but her behaviour did not cause his death, so could not constitute the actus reus. Thus there is no moment in time at which both the actus reus and mens rea of murder are present. Neither can an antecedent mens rea be added to a subsequent actus reus in order to support a conviction. Where the actus reus includes consequences, the requirement for concurrence applies to the behavioural element rather than its consequence. If D deliberately poisons V and V takes some hours to die, the facts that D repents in the meantime will not absolve her of murder. Conversely, if D is driving and accidentally hits a cyclist the fact that she realises the cyclist is V her enemy, and rejoices while he is dying of his injuries will not make her guilty of a homicide offence. For the purposes of concurrence, the actus reus has already occurred. The defendant forms the mens rea first but when they commit the actus reus they no longer have the mens rea (usually because they think that they have already performed the actus reus but by mistake they didn’t). 1. 2.

If you have a preconceived plan then you need only have mens rea at one particular link in the execution of the plan There was only “one transaction”. Insufficient time had elapsed between the actions of hitting the victim and pushing him off the cliff for the two actions to be treated as having been done on separate occasions. R v Church [1966] 1 QB 59 (no preconceived plan) Thabo Meli v R

The complex single transaction: Thabo Meli v R [1954] 1 WLR 228 The law is different when the actus reus of an offence occurs after D has mens rea. Here it will sometimes be possible to convict D on the basis that the particular act that caused harm was part of a larger, complex series of actions which should be viewed as a whole, where D has mens rea at some earlier point during that transaction. The classic case is Thabo Meli v R. four D conspired to kill V and dispose of his body. In accirdance with their plan, they struck V on the heaf (with intent to kill). Thinking him dead, they rolled him over a cliff. Infact V was not killed by the blow and died from exposure suffered after falling fown the cliff. Prima facie the act of disposal which caused V’s death was unaccompanied by the mens rea for murder since the D believed he was already dead. Nonetheless, Privy Council upheld their convitions for murder. Rather than slicing up the events of the killing into component moments of time and then looking for a scintilla tempoaris at which the actus reus and mens rea coincide. It is hard to disagree with this decision, which represents a genuine exception to the concurrence requirement. The defendants did exactly what they planned to do, and brought about exactly the result they intended. The fact that the manner in which their success occurred was unexpected seems no ground for exculpation. Thabo Meli applies in cases of intentional murder where “it is impossible to divide up a course of conduct into separate acts”

R v Ramsay

The D actions were deliberate and pursuant to a preconceived plan. This feature is crucial to application of Thabo Meli in NZ. In R v Ramsay. D had assaulted and gagged V whose death was caused by one or the other of the acts. However, it appeared that D may not have had the mens rea of murder when gagging V. the CA ruled that the assault and gagging could not be treated as a continuous single course of conduct. There was not a preconceived plan by D to behave the way he did, and his conduct could not be regarded as a series of actions governed throughout by a dominating intention to produce the actus reus. Hence Ds mens rea when he assaulted V could not be combined with actus reus when he gagged her to satisfy the requirements for murder. Although the rationale underlying Thabo Meli might have suggested a different conclusion, the Ca has taken a firm stance against further exceptions to the concurrence principle.

It follows from the decision in Ramsay that the Thabo Meli doctrine will not apply to crimes of recklessness or negligence. The NZ law on this point differs from the applicable law elsewhere, but it is defensible on the basis that it fosters certainty by confining exceptions to the concurrence requirement to those cases where there is a preconceived plan. It does not apply to reckless murder. Recklessness is a weaker state of mind. An intention can be so obvious that it is possible to say that every action on a particular occasion was “directed by that intention.” It is not possible to say that about a reckless state of mind (Note Kumar v R said this was obiter dicta) Kumar v R

Kumar: Pathologist Victim (Mr Prasad) was alive when he was set alight and his death was caused by thermal injuries. The Crown could not rule out the possibility that he was unconscious at this point because of a prior assault and that the defendants may have reasonably believed that he was dead Kumar and Permal Kumar (CA upheld by SC): Don’t need a preconceived plan. “Thabo Meli’s authority is beyond question: parties cannot avoid criminal liability simply because they believe mistakenly that they have achieved their objective by one act but in fact achieve it by a later and different act if both acts can be treated as logically successive or connected within the one continuous course of conduct attributable to or motivated by the same murderous intent. Irrespective of the circumstances the two acts are treated as one irrespective of ostensible temporal or physical separation.” “an appreciable time difference between the two acts did not absolve either participant from criminal liability, especially where the second act was designed to conceal the commission of the first. The issue is not determined by counting the number of minutes separating the two acts. Nor is it determined by counting the physical distance between what is said to be the place where the unlawful act was committed and the place of death. The issue, we repeat, is determined by an inquiry into whether the two material acts were sufficiently related to form part of the one continuous transaction such that both can be treated as motivated by the same murderous state of mind.”

Causation theory: McKinnon

The causation approach: Where the D’s mens rea precedes the action that most obviously constitutes the actus reus, another way of circumventing concurrence difficulties is to show that some earlier action nby the defendant, dome at the time when he or she had mens rea, was also a cause of the prohibited harm. An example is R v Mckinnon. Struck the deceased on the head with a fence paling (knocking him unconscious) and dragged him to a telephone booth where he robbed him Victim died by drowning in his own blood – bloody nose caused by a minor injury to his nose rather than being hit over the head with a fence paling Blow with the fence paling still a substantial and operative cause of death. Died from a bloody nose because he was unconscious from the blow to the head CA upheld D’s conviction for murder. Although D may not have had the required mens rea when he caused the injury to V’s nose, he did have mens rea when he struck V and knocked him unconscious. Moreover, the Court ruled D’s striking V was a contributory cause of his death, in combination with nose bleed since it rendered V unable to deal with the bleeding. Thus there was no need to invoke a series of acts analysis of the sort found in Thabo Meli, since there was already a scintilla temporis at which both an actus reus and mens rea of murder were present.

Involuntariness and antecedent fault

If D perpetuates an actus reus while in autonomic state, normally the concurrence requirement will not be satisfied. Exceptionally, however, it may be possible to convict D on the basis that his automatism is a consequence of his or her own earlier actions which occurred at a time when he had the mens rea for offence....