Proceedings
However, on 24 February 2004 the Criminal Cases Review Commission exercised its power under the Criminal Appeal Act 1995 to refer Kennedy's conviction for manslaughter back to the Court of Appeal, where it was again dismissed. Kennedy appealed to the House of Lords.
The Lords, sitting as an Appellate Committee, overturned the decision of the Court of Appeal and quashed Kennedy's conviction for manslaughter. They noted that a conviction of 'unlawful act' manslaughter (one of the two bases for manslaughter in English law, along with gross negligence) required the defendant to commit an unlawful act which was a crime and which was a significant cause of the deceased's death. The arguments in the case circled around the third point.
It was agreed that Kennedy had committed the crime of supplying a controlled drug to Bosque under the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971. The Lords stated, approving the Court of Appeal's ruling in R v Dalby [1982] 1 WLR 425, that the act of supplying drugs alone cannot be the foundation of a charge of unlawful act manslaughter as "the supply itself may have caused no harm unless the deceased had subsequently used the drugs in a form and quantity which was dangerous".
As such, the Crown Prosecution Service argued that Kennedy had committed the offence of "maliciously administering poison, etc., so as to endanger life or inflict grievous bodily harm" contrary to section 23 of the Offences Against the Person Act 1861 as the 'unlawful act' which was a significant cause of Bosque's death. It was argued that Kennedy had "administered" the heroin to Bosque, reading a wide interpretation of the word 'administer', by encouraging him to do so, such that he was jointly liable for Bosque having injected himself.
The Lords rejected this argument, recognising that an informed choice made with free will has historically been considered a novus actus interveniens in English law and specifically in the context of preparing a heroin injection in R v Dias [2002] Cr App R 96; while Kennedy may have "made more likely" that Bosque would inject himself, he did not cause him to do it as Bosque's choice had broken the chain of causation. This meant that he had not committed the crime under section 23, and so there was no basis for the manslaughter charge.
Neither was Kennedy an accomplice as Bosque had not committed an offence in injecting himself with heroin, as the Misuse of Drugs Act did not criminalise the act of injecting or otherwise administering drugs. As such, the only unlawful act committed by Kennedy was not a significant cause of Bosque's death, and no conviction of manslaughter could be reached. Accordingly, Kennedy's conviction for manslaughter was quashed.
Life imprisonment is any sentence of imprisonment for a crime under which convicted criminals are to remain in prison for the rest of their natural lives. Crimes that warrant life imprisonment are extremely serious and usually violent. Examples of these crimes are murder, torture, terrorism, child abuse resulting in death, rape, espionage, treason, illegal drug trade, human trafficking, severe fraud and financial crimes, aggravated property damage, arson, hate crime, kidnapping, burglary, robbery, theft, piracy, aircraft hijacking, and genocide.
Entrapment is a practice in which a law enforcement agent or an agent of the state induces a person to commit a "crime" that the person would have otherwise been unlikely or unwilling to commit. It "is the conception and planning of an offense by an officer or agent, and the procurement of its commission by one who would not have perpetrated it except for the trickery, persuasion or fraud of the officer or state agent".
The Computer Misuse Act 1990 is an act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom, introduced partly in response to the decision in R v Gold & Schifreen (1988) 1 AC 1063. Critics of the bill complained that it was introduced hastily, was poorly thought out, and that intention was often difficult to prove, with the bill inadequately differentiating "joyriding" hackers like Gold and Schifreen from serious computer criminals. The Act has nonetheless become a model from which several other countries, including Canada and the Republic of Ireland, have drawn inspiration when subsequently drafting their own information security laws, as it is seen "as a robust and flexible piece of legislation in terms of dealing with cybercrime". Several amendments have been passed to keep the Act up to date.
The Offences against the Person Act 1861 is an Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. It consolidated provisions related to offences against the person from a number of earlier statutes into a single Act. For the most part these provisions were, according to the draftsman of the Act, incorporated with little or no variation in their phraseology. It is one of a group of Acts sometimes referred to as the Criminal Law Consolidation Acts 1861. It was passed with the object of simplifying the law. It is essentially a revised version of an earlier consolidation act, the Offences Against the Person Act 1828, incorporating subsequent statutes.
Causing death by dangerous driving is a statutory offence in England and Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, as well as Hong Kong. It is an aggravated form of dangerous driving. In the UK, it was created by section 1 of the Road Traffic Act 1988, and in Hong Kong it was created by section 36 of the Road Traffic Ordinance.
In law, an omission is a failure to act, which generally attracts different legal consequences from positive conduct. In the criminal law, an omission will constitute an actus reus and give rise to liability only when the law imposes a duty to act and the defendant is in breach of that duty. In tort law, similarly, liability will be imposed for an omission only exceptionally, when it can be established that the defendant was under a duty to act or duty of care.
The doctrine of common purpose, common design, joint enterprise, joint criminal enterprise or parasitic accessory liability is a common law legal doctrine that imputes criminal liability to the participants in a criminal enterprise for all reasonable results from that enterprise. The common purpose doctrine was established in English law, and later adopted in other common-law jurisdictions including Scotland, Ireland, Australia, Trinidad and Tobago, the Solomon Islands, Texas, the International Criminal Court, and the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.
Self-defence is a defence permitting reasonable force to be used to defend one's self or another. This defence arises from both common law and the Criminal Law Act 1967. Self-defence is a justification defence rather than an excuse.
Murder is an offence under the common law legal system of England and Wales. It is considered the most serious form of homicide, in which one person kills another with the intention to unlawfully cause either death or serious injury. The element of intentionality was originally termed malice aforethought, although it required neither malice nor premeditation. Baker, chapter 14 states that many killings done with a high degree of subjective recklessness were treated as murder from the 12th century right through until the 1974 decision in DPP v Hyam.
In the English law of homicide, manslaughter is a less serious offence than murder, the differential being between levels of fault based on the mens rea or by reason of a partial defence. In England and Wales, a common practice is to prefer a charge of murder, with the judge or defence able to introduce manslaughter as an option. The jury then decides whether the defendant is guilty or not guilty of either murder or manslaughter. On conviction for manslaughter, sentencing is at the judge's discretion, whereas a sentence of life imprisonment is mandatory on conviction for murder. Manslaughter may be either voluntary or involuntary, depending on whether the accused has the required mens rea for murder.
Manslaughter is a common law legal term for homicide considered by law as less culpable than murder. The distinction between murder and manslaughter is sometimes said to have first been made by the ancient Athenian lawmaker Draco in the 7th century BC.
English criminal law concerns offences, their prevention and the consequences, in England and Wales. Criminal conduct is considered to be a wrong against the whole of a community, rather than just the private individuals affected. The state, in addition to certain international organisations, has responsibility for crime prevention, for bringing the culprits to justice, and for dealing with convicted offenders. The police, the criminal courts and prisons are all publicly funded services, though the main focus of criminal law concerns the role of the courts, how they apply criminal statutes and common law, and why some forms of behaviour are considered criminal. The fundamentals of a crime are a guilty act and a guilty mental state. The traditional view is that moral culpability requires that a defendant should have recognised or intended that they were acting wrongly, although in modern regulation a large number of offences relating to road traffic, environmental damage, financial services and corporations, create strict liability that can be proven simply by the guilty act.
Fault, as a legal term, refers to legal blameworthiness and responsibility in each area of law. It refers to both the actus reus and the mental state of the defendant. The basic principle is that a defendant should be able to contemplate the harm that his actions may cause, and therefore should aim to avoid such actions. Different forms of liability employ different notions of fault, in some there is no need to prove fault, but the absence of it.
Child destruction is the name of a statutory offence in England and Wales, Northern Ireland, Hong Kong and in some parts of Australia.
R v R[1991] UKHL 12 is a decision in which the House of Lords determined that under English criminal law, it is a crime for a husband to rape his wife.
Life imprisonment has been the most severe criminal sentence in New Zealand since the death penalty was abolished in 1989, having not been used since 1957.
John Harris Byrne is a retired Australian jurist who previously served as Senior Judge Administrator of the Supreme Court of Queensland. Having been a judge of that court since 1989, he was one of the court's most experienced judges. He was also Chair of the National Judicial College of Australia, a body which provides programs and professional development resources to judicial officers in Australia. He is now a private Commercial Arbitrator.
English law contains homicide offences – those acts involving the death of another person. For a crime to be considered homicide, it must take place after the victim's legally recognised birth, and before their legal death. There is also the usually uncontroversial requirement that the victim be under the "King's peace". The death must be causally linked to the actions of the defendant. Since the abolition of the year and a day rule, there is no maximum time period between any act being committed and the victim's death, so long as the former caused the latter.
R v Shivpuri [1986] UKHL 2 is a House of Lords case in English law as to whether a criminal attempt which had a "more than merely preparatory act" and mens rea of an inchoate stage but of a crime which transpired to be impossible in its completion – as the actus reus unwittingly related to a lawful, not what the defendant apprehended to be an unlawful substance – amounted to an attempt to commit a crime. The judicial panel, the highest court of England, decided it would amount to the crimes of attempted dealing in and harbouring a controlled drug, with intent to evade the prohibition of importation of the same. In doing so, it overturned its own ruling the year before in Anderton v Ryan, applying the Practice Statement of 1966.
R v Jogee[2016] UKSC 8 was a 2016 judgment of the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom that reversed previous case law on joint enterprise. The Supreme Court delivered its ruling jointly with the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, which was considering an appeal from Jamaica, Ruddock v The Queen [2016] UKPC 7.
