Corporate manslaughter in English law

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Corporate manslaughter is a criminal offence in English law, being an act of homicide committed by a company or organisation. In general, in English criminal law, a juristic person is in the same position as a natural person, and may be convicted for committing many offences. The Court of Appeal confirmed in one of the cases following the Herald of Free Enterprise disaster that a company can, in principle, commit manslaughter, although all defendants in that case were acquitted. [1]

Contents

Theory and historical development

The common law test to impose criminal responsibility on a company only arises where a person's gross negligence has led to another person's death and (under the "identification doctrine") that person is a "controlling mind", whose actions and intentions can be imputed to the company (that is, a person in control of the company's affairs to a sufficient degree that the company can fairly be said to think and act through him). This is tested by reference to the detailed work patterns of the manager, and the job title or description given to that person is irrelevant, but there is often no single person who acts as a "controlling mind", particularly in large companies, and many issues of health and safety are delegated to junior managers who are not "controlling minds". [2] [3]

On 6 March 1987, 193 people died when the Herald of Free Enterprise capsized. Although individual employees failed in their duties, the Sheen Report severely criticised the attitude to safety prevalent in P&O, stating: [4]

All concerned in management ... were at fault in that all must be regarded as sharing responsibility for the failure of management. From top to bottom the body corporate was infected with the disease of sloppiness.

There was significant institutional resistance to the appropriateness of using the criminal law in general, and homicide charges in particular in this type of situation.[ citation needed ] Judicial review of the coroner's inquest persuaded the Director of Public Prosecutions to bring manslaughter charges against P&O European Ferries and seven employees, but the trial judge ruled that there was no evidence that one sufficiently senior member of the company's management could be said to have been negligent.

A subsequent appeal confirmed that corporate manslaughter is a charge known to English criminal law, and with the revival of gross negligence as a mens rea for manslaughter, it was thought that prosecutions might succeed. [1] However, a prosecution of Great Western Trains following the Southall rail crash collapsed because "the Crown was not in a position to satisfy the doctrine of identification" (Turner J). Only the company itself and the train driver, Mr Larry Harrison, were prosecuted. Since the train driver is not someone of a managerial or directorial level, the case against him was dismissed in the opening arguments. Because the only other defendant was GWT, a corporation, this meant that it was impossible to identify a controlling mind for the purposes of holding an individual personally liable for manslaughter.

In English law, proving corporate manslaughter and securing a conviction of an individual where the corporation involved is a small concern are easier where it is easier to identify a "controlling mind" (in R v OLL Ltd, 1994, about the Lyme Bay canoeing tragedy, managing director Peter Kite was convicted), but efforts to convict people in larger corporate entities tends to fail as the management structure is more diffuse making this identification more difficult. Instead, the prosecution stands more chance of pursuing a case successfully if it prosecutes simply on the grounds of a safety breach under the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974.

Following R v. Prentice, [5] a breach of duty amounts to 'gross negligence' when there is:

indifference to an obvious risk of injury to health; actual foresight of the risk coupled with the determination nevertheless to run it; appreciation of the risk coupled with an intention to avoid it but also coupled with such a high degree of negligence in the attempted avoidance as the jury consider justifies conviction, and inattention or failure to advert to a serious risk which goes "beyond inadvertence" in respect of an obvious and important matter which the defendant's duty demanded he should address.

The Law Commission's 1996 report on involuntary manslaughter found that the gross negligence formula overcomes the problems of having to find one particular officer who has the mens rea for the offence and allows emphasis to be placed on the company's attitude to safety. [6] This question would only arise where the company has chosen to enter a field of activity that carries a risk to others, such as transport, manufacture or medical care. The steps the company has taken to discharge the "duty of safety" and the systems devised for running its business, will be directly relevant. Although only expressed as a provisional view, it is significant that the Law Commission echoes here the recognition of corporate safety systems voiced in the Seaboard case. Thus, a real tension is exposed between the paradigm of criminal culpability based on individual responsibility and the increasing recognition of the potential for harm inherent in large scale corporate activity.

The government issued a consultation paper in 2000, proposing reforms to the law to implement the recommendations of the Law Commission. A draft Corporate Manslaughter Bill was published in March 2005, and the Queen's Speech on 17 May 2005 included a reference to an Act of Parliament to be passed in 2005/6 to widen the scope for prosecutions for corporate manslaughter.[ citation needed ]

New legislation from 2008

A Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Bill was introduced to the House of Commons by Home Secretary John Reid on 20 July 2006 to create new offences of corporate manslaughter, in England and Wales, and corporate homicide, in Scotland. Originally, the Bill proposed that the offence would require a company's or organisation's activities to be so managed or organised by its senior managers as to cause a person's death, and to amount to a "gross breach" of a duty of care owed to the deceased. The requirement for the failure of management or organisation to have been "by its senior managers" was dropped in Standing Committee. The Bill also sought to abolish the common law offence of manslaughter by gross negligence so far as it applies to corporations. A juristic person cannot be imprisoned, but the penalty would be an unlimited fine as for the existing common law offence. The Bill received royal assent on 26 July 2007, becoming the Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Act 2007. [7] The Act came into force on 6 April 2008. [8] On 15 November 2007, the Sentencing Guidelines Council issued a consultative document [9] recommending a starting point of a fine of 5% of turnover for a first offence with a not guilty plea, rising to 10% of turnover. [10]

Related Research Articles

In law, provocation is when a person is considered to have committed a criminal act partly because of a preceding set of events that might cause a reasonable individual to lose self control. This makes them less morally culpable than if the act was premeditated (pre-planned) and done out of pure malice. It "affects the quality of the actor's state of mind as an indicator of moral blameworthiness."

Vehicular homicide is a crime that involves the death of a person other than the driver as a result of either criminally negligent or murderous operation of a motor vehicle.

In United States law, depraved-heart murder, also known as depraved-indifference murder, is a type of murder where an individual acts with a "depraved indifference" to human life and where such act results in a death, despite that individual not explicitly intending to kill. In a depraved-heart murder, defendants commit an act even though they know their act runs an unusually high risk of causing death or serious bodily harm to a person. If the risk of death or bodily harm is great enough, ignoring it demonstrates a "depraved indifference" to human life and the resulting death is considered to have been committed with malice aforethought. In some states, depraved-heart killings constitute second-degree murder, while in others, the act would be charged with "wanton murder," varying degrees of manslaughter, or third-degree murder.

In criminal law, criminal negligence is a surrogate state of mind required to constitute a conventional offense. It is not, strictly speaking, a mens rea because it refers to an objective standard of behaviour expected of the defendant and does not refer to their mental state.

Culpable homicide is a categorisation of certain offences in various jurisdictions within the Commonwealth of Nations which involves the illegal killing of a person either with or without an intention to kill depending upon how a particular jurisdiction has defined the offence. Unusually for those legal systems which have originated or been influenced during rule by the United Kingdom, the name of the offence associates with Scots law rather than English law.

In criminal law and in the law of tort, recklessness may be defined as the state of mind where a person deliberately and unjustifiably pursues a course of action while consciously disregarding any risks flowing from such action. Recklessness is less culpable than malice, but is more blameworthy than carelessness.

Corporate liability, also referred to as liability of legal persons, determines the extent to which a company as a legal person can be held liable for the acts and omissions of the natural persons it employs and, in some legal systems, for those of other associates and business partners.

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.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974</span> United Kingdom legislation

The Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974 is an Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom that as of 2011 defines the fundamental structure and authority for the encouragement, regulation and enforcement of workplace health, safety and welfare within the United Kingdom.

In English law, provocation was a mitigatory defence to murder which had taken many guises over generations many of which had been strongly disapproved and modified. In closing decades, in widely upheld form, it amounted to proving a reasonable total loss of control as a response to another's objectively provocative conduct sufficient to convert what would otherwise have been murder into manslaughter. It only applied to murder. It was abolished on 4 October 2010 by section 56(1) of the Coroners and Justice Act 2009, but thereby replaced by the superseding—and more precisely worded—loss of control.

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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">English criminal law</span> Legal system of England and Wales relating to crime

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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Act 2007</span> United Kingdom legislation

The Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Act 2007 is an Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom that seeks to broaden the law on corporate manslaughter in the United Kingdom. The Act created a new offence respectively named corporate manslaughter in England and Wales and Northern Ireland, and corporate homicide in Scotland.

Corporate manslaughter is a crime in several jurisdictions, including England and Wales and Hong Kong. It enables a corporation to be punished and censured for culpable conduct that leads to a person's death. This extends beyond any compensation that might be awarded in civil litigation or any criminal prosecution of an individual. The Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Act 2007 came into effect in the UK on 6 April 2008.

In the United Kingdom there are several crimes that arise from failure to take care of health, safety and welfare at work.

The case of Transco Plc v HMA[2004] S.L.T. 41 was the first ever prosecution for culpable homicide in Scotland with regards to a public limited company. The decision is seen as significant in UK corporate manslaughter law and in particular in Scots law, as there are very few cases which address the criminal liability of corporations under Scots law.

The omissions of individuals are generally not criminalised in English criminal law, save in many instances of a taking on of a duty of care, having contractual responsibility or clearly negligent creation of a hazard. Many comparator jurisdictions put a general statutory duty on strangers to rescue – this is not so in English law. Defenders and reasoners of the position regard it as wrong for the criminal law to punish people in many circumstances for committing no physical act, which it is argued would be an infringement on human autonomy. Academics arguing for reform argue that a social responsibility to assist others should exist, particularly where there would be no danger to the rescuer.

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 "Queen'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.

References

  1. 1 2 R. v. P & O Ferries (Dover) Ltd (1991) 93 Cr App Rep 72 (citation explained).
  2. ↑ Tesco v. Nattrass [1972] AC 153, HL
  3. ↑ Attorney-General's Reference (No.2 of 1999) [2000] QB 796, CA
  4. ↑ Department of Transport (1987), The Merchant Shipping Act 1894, mv Herald of Free Enterprise, Report of Court No 8074 (Sheen Report), London: HMSO
  5. ↑ (1993) 3 WLR 937
  6. ↑ Involuntary Manslaughter Archived 2006-01-08 at the Wayback Machine , Law Commission Report 237, 1996.
  7. ↑ Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Bill, Parliament website.
  8. ↑ "Understanding the Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Act 2007" (PDF). Ministry of Justice. Retrieved 3 January 2013.
  9. ↑ "Consultation Paper on Sentencing for Corporate Manslaughter" (PDF). Sentencing Guidelines Council. Archived from the original (PDF) on 16 February 2008. Retrieved 12 December 2007.
  10. ↑ "Companies face record corporate manslaughter fines". Solicitors' Journal. 2007. Retrieved 12 December 2007.[ permanent dead link ]

Bibliography

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