Criminal Cases MODS - Actus reus and mens Rea case notes PDF

Preview

Summary

Actus reus and mens Rea case notes ...

Description

Basic Principles of Criminal Law Larsonneur (1933) 24 Cr App R 74. - D had a French passport and was granted access to England. She had to leave the country by a certain date. She left England on that date for Ireland but was deported from Ireland and was sent back to England in Irish custody. She was found in England and convicted under the Aliens Restrictions Act for being in the country as an alien to whom leave to land had been refused. She was convicted at second trial and appealed on conviction. The reason she was there does not matter; she violated the act – strict liability. Attorney-General’s Reference (no 2 of 1992) [1994] QB 91, [1993] 3 W.L.R 982 National Health Service Trust v Bland [1993] 1 All ER 821, [1993] Crim LR 760-762 - Bland was a young supporter of Liverpool F.C. who was caught in the Hillsborough crush which reduced him to a Persistent Vegetative State. He had been in this state for three years and was being kept alive on life support machines. His brain stem was still functioning, which controlled his heartbeat, breathing and digestion, so technically he was still alive. However, he was not conscious and had no hope of recovery. The hospital, with the consent of his parents, applied for a declaration from the court to lawfully discontinue all life-sustaining treatment and medical support measures designed to keep Bland alive in that state, including the termination of ventilation, nutrition and hydration by artificial means. The declaration to end treatment was granted. Although the court recognised the intention was to cause Bland’s death, the withdrawal of treatment was properly characterised as an omission. If there is a duty for the hospital to act, the hospital would be criminally liable for the omission. However, there is no duty for a hospital to treat a patient if it is not in the best interest (Lord Goff: it is difficult to say that it is in the best interests, but it certainly not in best interests to leave him as such) of the patient. Since there was no prospect of the treatment improving his condition the treatment was futile and there was no interest in Tony Bland in continuing the process of artificially feeding him upon which the prolongation of his life depends. Here, there is a distinction between ‘ending’ – an act, and ‘not continuing’ – an omission. Miller [1983] 2 AC 161 - D fell asleep on a mattress with a lighted cigarette in his hand. He awoke and saw that the cigarette had started a small fire. Upon seeing the fire, he then got up and went to another room and went back to sleep. The fire subsequently flared up and spread. D was convicted of arson; not for starting the fire but for failing to do anything about it (i.e. and omission). Lord Diplock: "I see no rational ground for excluding from conduct capable of giving rise to criminal liability, conduct which consists of failing to take measures that lie within one's power to counteract a danger that one has oneself created, if at the time of such conduct one's state of mind is such as constitutes a necessary ingredient of the offence. I venture to think that the habit of lawyers to talk of "actus reus," suggestive as it is of action rather than inaction, is responsible for any erroneous notion that failure to act cannot give rise to criminal liability in English law." Diplock preferred the duty to avert danger to the continuous act theory. Under Miller, D must have the mens rea required for the crime which he is charged at the time of the omission to avert the danger he has created. – Duty arises here upon his subjective realization of the danger. Stone and Dobinson [1977] QB 354, [1977] Crim LR 166 - The defendants, S and D, were a couple who took in the victim, S’s sister, as a lodger. S had severe disabilities, being partially deaf and blind. D had learning difficulties. Whilst staying with the defendants, the victim became unable to care for herself, having long struggled with mental health issues and obsession about her weight. D made

some efforts to care for her, bringing her food and washing her with the help of a neighbour. However, her attempts were not sustained and inadequate, and the victim passed away. The defendants were charged with manslaughter. Stone’s case, a duty of care was owed on the basis that she was a blood relative, whilst Dobinson had undertaken a duty of care by washing her and providing food. Regarding the issue of negligence, the Court of Appeal held that in order to ground a conviction for manslaughter the defendants must have been ‘grossly negligent’ in respect of their breach of duty. Geoffrey Lane LJ suggested that such gross negligence required the defendants to have been either ‘indifferent’ to the risk of injury, or have foreseen the risk and run it nevertheless. The conviction of gross negligence manslaughter was upheld. – courts took a strict line of action, D possibly believed he had behaved sufficiently with his duty due to his mental incapacity. Roberts [1971] 56 Cr. App. R. 95, [1972] Crim LR 27 – Jordan (1956) 40 Cr App R 152 - D stabbed the V. In hospital, V had almost recovered from the wounds, before being given antibiotics (terramycin), to which he suffered an allergic reaction. He was also given excessive amounts of intravenous liquids. New evidence - not available at the original trial - indicated that the victim’s death was most likely caused by the V’s unusual reaction to the antibiotics. D was not liable for the V’s death; the victim died of the medical treatment and not the stab wound. The medical treatment was 'palpably wrong' and would have 'precluded' a jury from holding that death was caused by the defendant's action. Smith [1959] 2 QB 35 at 43 – D stabbed V with a bayonet during a fight in barracks. V's friend took him to the first aid post, but on the way, he dropped V twice. At the first aid post the medical officer was busy and took some time to get to V who died about two hours after the stabbing. Had he been given proper treatment he would probably have recovered. The treatment he was given was thoroughly bad and might well have affected his chances of recovery, but medical treatment correct or not does not break the chain of causation. If at the time of death, the original wound is still an operating cause and a substantial cause, then death can be said to be a result of the wound albeit that some other cause is also operating. Only when the second cause of death is so overwhelming as to make the original wound merely part of the history can it be said that death does not flow from the wound. Malcherek & Steel [1981] 2 ALL ER 422, [1981] Crim LR 401 - Two separate appeals were heard together in this case. In Malcherek the defendant had stabbed his wife. In Steel, the defendant was accused of sexually assaulting and beating a woman over the head with a stone. In both cases the victims had been taken to hospital and placed on life support machines. The doctors in the respective cases later switched off the life support machines as both victims were not showing any activity in their brain stem. The defendants sought to argue that the doctors' actions constituted a novus actus interveniens which broke the chain of causation. The conviction was upheld by the Court of Appeal. The doctors' decision did not break the chain of causation; both defendants' acts could be regarded as the cause of their victim’s death. The test of death is where the brain stem has died. Thus, at the time of switching off the machine, the victims were already dead. Cheshire [1991] 2 ALL ER 670, [1991] Crim LR 709 - Narrowed Jordan further. D shot V in the leg. In hospital, V was treated, and the wounds ceased to be life threatening. However, following a negligently performed tracheotomy by a doctor, (x), V's windpipe narrowed due to an infection caused by the tube and he died. D was charged with murder and convicted as he remained the legal cause of the death. X's intervention must be 'SO INDEPENDENT OF D'S ACTS, AND IN ITSELF SO

POTENT IN CAUSING DEATH, THAT THE JURY REGARD THE CONTRIBUTION MADE BY D'S ACTS AS INSIGNIFICANT'. This is a seriously difficult test to break. Doctors therefore remain liable, but in very narrow circumstances. Really bad treatment can be foreseeable in emergency circumstances, which D has created. Therefore, D should take the consequences if things go wrong. Blaue [1975] 1 WLR 1411 – D stabbed V, which punctured her lung. At the hospital, the victim was told that she would need a blood transfusion to save her life. However, she refused the blood transfusion as she saw it as being contrary to her religious beliefs (she was a practising Jehovah's Witness) – if her parents had refused the treatment for her then D would still have been liable and the parents may also have been guilty of some homicide offence. The victim died the next day. The defendant had been convicted, at first instance, and was convicted of manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility. The defendant appealed to the Court of Appeal arguing that the novus's refusal to accept the blood transfusion was a novus actus interveniens breaking the chain of causation. The defendant's original conviction was upheld (i.e. he was found to be guilty of manslaughter). The wound was still an operative cause of death (following R v Smith [1959] and R v Jordan (1956) – see later) so no there was no novus actus interveniens – the chain of causation was not broken. It has long been the policy of the law that those who use violence on other people must take their victims as they find them. This principle clearly applies to the mental as well as the physical characteristics of the victim, and the courts will rarely make a judgement as to whether the victim's response was reasonable. Pagett (1983) 76 Cr App R 279, [1983] Crim LR 393. – D, armed with a shotgun and cartridges, shot at police who were attempting to arrest him. D held a 16-year-old girl who was pregnant by him as a shield. The officers returned fire and the girl was killed. At first instance, D was convicted of manslaughter. He appealed against the manslaughter conviction on the issue of causation. The manslaughter conviction was upheld. The firing at the police officers caused them to fire back. In firing back, the police officers were acting in self-defence. Though the court regarded the officer’s instinctive behaviour as ‘involuntary’, they also held that neither a reasonable act of self-defence, nor an act done in the execution of duty to prevent crime or arrest an offender, using such force as is reasonable in the circumstances, will break the chain of causation. *Kennedy (No 2) [2007] UKHL 38, [2008] Crim LR 222 - Where D supplies V with a prepared syringe of heroin and V self-injects causing death, D is not the legal cause of the death. D's conviction of manslaughter was thus quashed. The chain of causation has been broken by a novus actus interveniens, the free, voluntary and informed choice by V to self-inject. V's acts were held to be free despite his addiction showing that this is interpreted broadly. Lord Bingham: D who supplies drugs for V to self-inject can never be guilty of unlawful manslaughter if V is a fully informed adult making a voluntary decision to inject. Norrie argues that that presented with a syringe, it is reasonable to expect a drug addict to inject and questions whether a concept of joint, concerted action is really so implausible- suggesting that there are defensible moral grounds for culpability in drug cases. Hughes [2013] UKSC 56, [2014] Crim LR 234, (2014) 73 CLJ 14. – Hughes was driving faultlessly but was doing so deliberately without insurance. The victim, a driver whose ability to drive safely was severely impaired through his self-administration of drugs, collided with Hughes. Hughes could have done nothing to prevent the resulting death of the victim (overruled Williams in that 3ZB creates a homicide offence, thus it must be favourable to D, it was thus not enough for D’s car simply to be on the road to be struck – it needed to be proven that it was something that D did or omitted to do by

way of driving that contributed in a way more than minimal to V’s death) To cause death requires more than a state of affairs. Steane [1947] KB 997 – (Lord Bridge referred to this case in Moloney) The appellant was a British radio announcer who was living in Germany during WWII. With his family under threat he was forced to broadcast on the radio for the Nazis. After the war, when he returned to Britain, he was charged with "doing acts likely to help the enemy with the intent to assist the enemy". He was convicted at trial which he appealed. Appeal allowed, no conviction. Normally, merely the intent to broadcast would have sufficed this crime, however the wording requires there to be intent to assist the enemy for a conviction. There was obviously no intent to assist the enemy here; he was forced and threatened into doing it. There can be no presumption that merely doing the action implied his intent to help the enemy. The acquittal would more properly have been based on one of duress. Gillick [1986] AC 112, [1986] Crim LR 113 - Mrs Gillick was a mother with five daughters under the age of 16. She sought a declaration that it would be unlawful for a doctor to prescribe contraceptives to girls under 16 without the knowledge or consent of the parent, which was refused. Some judges argued that the doctor would not be guilty of abetting the man’s commission of the sexual offence, because the doctor’s intention was to protect the girl, not to encourage sexual intercourse with her. The acquittal seems to be based on one of necessity – some degree of encouragement of sexual intercourse was a lesser evil than an unwanted pregnancy. D had an ‘honourable purpose’ in these two cases (one above), if D did not, the courts would probably have interpreted them more narrowly. Moloney [1985] AC 905, [1985] Crim LR 378 – D shot his step father, killing him. The two had a challenge to see who could load and draw a gun first, D did, to which V said, "I don't think you have got the guts but if you have pull the trigger". D pulled the trigger but in his drunken state he did not believe the gun was aimed at the step father. D’s conviction for murder was substituted for manslaughter. It was not a case of oblique intent. Lord Bridge: “…invite the jury to consider two questions. First, was death or really serious injury in a murder case (or whatever relevant consequence must be proved to have been intended) a natural consequence of the defendant's voluntary act? Secondly, did the defendant foresee that consequence as being a natural consequence of his act? The jury should then be told that if they answer yes to both questions it is a proper inference for them to draw that he intended that consequence." Criticism as the phrase ‘may also find’ leaves flexibility for the jury. Lord Bridge insisted the need for a ‘moral certainty’, a probability which is ‘little short of overwhelming’ and an act that ‘will lead to a certain event unless something unexpected supervenes to prevent it.’ *Woollin [1999] 1 AC 82, [1998] Crim LR 890. - appellant threw his 3-month-old baby son on to a hard surface. The baby suffered a fractured skull and died. Murder conviction was substituted with manslaughter conviction. There was a material misdirection which expanded the mens rea of murder and therefore the murder conviction was unsafe. The House of Lords substantially agreed with the Nedrick guidelines with a minor modification. The appropriate direction is: "Where the charge is murder and in the rare cases where the simple direction is not enough, the jury should be directed that they are not entitled to infer the necessary intention, unless they feel sure that death or serious bodily harm was a virtual certainty (barring some unforeseen intervention) as a result of the defendant's actions and that the defendant appreciated that such was the case.” -allowing the jury to retain ‘moral elbow room’ – also preferred since it draws a line between intention and recklessness.

*Re A (children) (conjoined twins; surgical separation) [2001] 2 W.L.R. 480, [2001] Crim L.R. 400 *Matthews and Alleyne [2003] EWCA Crim 192, [2003] 2 Cr App R 30, [2003] Crim LR 553 - The defendants threw the victim into a river where he drowned, not intending the death of the victim, as the victim should have been able to swim – although, a witness accounts that V told them he could not swim. Murder conviction upheld. Although the conviction was safe (virtual certainty), the judge erred in finding that R v Woollin [1999] laid down a rule of law – an appeal way brought because the judge directed the jury that foresight of virtual certainty was intention. The Woollin criteria is a rule of evidence: a jury direction which entitles a jury to find intent if the resulting death was virtually certain; it does not require a jury to find intent from virtual certainty and does not law down a rule of substantive law. *R v Wallace [2018] EWCA Crim 690 Cunningham [1957] 2 QB 396, [1957] Crim LR 326 - Appellant removed a gas meter in order to steal the money inside. The meter however was connected to the neighbouring house which was occupied by the appellant’s future mother-in-law, who was in her property asleep. The removal caused gas to leak, which in turn lead to her being poisoned by the gas. D was charged with unlawfully and maliciously endangering his future mother-in-law’s life. The appellant was convicted at trial, with the judge instructing the jury that for the meaning of “malice” in this context is “wicked” or otherwise “–“something which he has no business to do and perfectly well knows it”. The appellant’s conviction was quashed on the grounds that the judged had erred in describing the meaning of “malicious” as “wicked” – this was an incorrect definition and the trial judge misled the jury into believing that if the appellant had acted wickedly, he had also acted maliciously. The correct test for malice was whether the defendant had either actual intent to cause harm or was reckless as to the possibility of causing foreseeable harm. The jury should have been left to decide whether, even without intending to cause harm, the appellant removed the gas meter despite foreseeing that its removal could cause harm to his future mother-in-law. D was guilty if he was aware, when he broke off the gas meter (when the action(s) took place), or left the pipe with gas gushing out, that it might be inhaled by someone. It is not sufficient that, had D stopped to think, it would have been obvious that there was a risk. He must recognize the risk and deliberately take it. – Cunningham recklessness. Court stated on malice: ‘the word “maliciously” in a statutory crime postulates foresight of consequence.” – no mention of the risk being unjustifiably taken in the definition. Caldwell [1982] AC 341, [1981] Crim LR 392 - Appellant had been working at a hotel and had a grudge against his employer. One night after consuming a large quantity of alcohol he went to the hotel and started a fire. The hotel had 10 guests sleeping in the hotel. No people were actually harmed. The appellant was convicted of aggravated criminal damage under s.1(2) Criminal Damage Act 1971 and appealed in relation to the required level of recklessness – arguing that he had given no thought as to the possible endangerment of life due to his intoxicated state. Caldwell recklessness: A person is reckless as to whether property is destroyed or damaged where: (1) he does an act which in fact creates an obvious risk that property will be destroyed or damaged and (2) when he does the act he (i) either has not given any thought to the possibility of there being any such risk or (ii) has recognised that there was some risk involved and has nonetheless gone on to do it. Further element of culpability was either (1) D’s failure to give thought as to whether there was such a ‘risk’ (‘inadvertent recklessness’) or (2) D’s knowledge that there was ‘some risk’ (‘advertent recklessness’) Lord Diplock: “self-induced intoxication is no defence to a crime in which recklessness is enough to constitute the necessary mens rea……….Reducing oneself by drink or drugs to a

condition in which the restraints of reason and conscience are cast off was held to be a reckless cour...