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 (Latin for "guilty mind") 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 (see alternative verdict). 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.
Voluntary manslaughter occurs when the defendant kills with mens rea (an intention to kill or cause grievous bodily harm), but one of those partial defences which reduce murder to manslaughter applies (these consist of mitigating circumstances which reduce the defendant's culpability). The original mitigating factors were provocation and chance medley which existed at common law, but the former has been abolished by statute, the latter has been held no longer to exist [1] and new defences have been created by statute.
The Homicide Act 1957 now provides two defences which may be raised to allow the court to find the accused guilty of voluntary manslaughter: diminished responsibility and suicide pact. The Coroners and Justice Act 2009 creates the defence of "loss of control".
Under section 2 of the Homicide Act 1957 there are three requirements for the defendant to raise the defence of diminished responsibility. The defendant must have suffered from an abnormality of mind at the time of the killing caused by one of the causes specified by the Act which substantially impaired the defendant's mental responsibility for the killing. Under section 2(2) of the Act it is for the defendant to prove he suffered from such a condition on the balance of probabilities.
An abnormality of mind has been defined by Lord Parker CJ "as state of mind so different from that of ordinary human beings that the reasonable man would term it abnormal". [2] In deciding whether this state of mind exists the jury should consider medical evidence, but also all other evidence including acts and statements of the accused and his demeanour. The jury does not have to accept the medical evidence if other material conflicts with and outweighs it.
The Homicide Act specifies three causes one of which must cause the abnormality; they are a condition of arrested or retarded development of mind, any inherent cause or a disease or injury. Whether the abnormality is caused by one of the specified causes is a matter for medical evidence alone. [2] Alcoholism is capable of being an abnormality of mind even if there is no physical damage to the brain. [3]
Whether the abnormality substantially impaired the defendant's mental responsibility for the killing is a question of degree for the jury. In R v Lloyd the Court of Appeal held that the lack of control must simply be ‘more than trivial’. [4]
Premenstrual tension (PMT) has been accepted as a mitigating factor in several high-profile cases. In 1980, Sandie Smith was convicted of manslaughter for stabbing a barmaid. Dr. Katharina Dalton who examined Smith before the trial diagnosed her with severe PMS. This diagnosis was accepted as a cause of diminished responsibility. Smith was sentenced to three years probation despite previous convictions for violent behaviour. [5]
Loss of control is a partial defence to murder introduced by the Coroners and Justice Act 2009. It replaced the previous defence of provocation.
Section 4(1) of the Homicide Act 1957 introduced the defence of suicide pact. Parliament's intention was to show some compassion for those who had been involved in a suicide pact but failed to die. Section 4(3) defines a suicide pact as "a common agreement between two or more persons having for its object the death of all of them, whether or not each is to take his own life". Further the accused must have had a "settled intention of dying in pursuance of the pact" to avoid the accused entering into a supposed pact with the real intention of committing murder. The Law Commission has proposed abolishing the defence with deserving cases falling within diminished responsibility, [6] but feels it should be retained pending a review of a new partial defence of mercy killings. [7]
Involuntary manslaughter arises where the accused did not intend to cause death or serious injury but caused the death of another through recklessness or criminal negligence. For these purposes, recklessness is defined as a blatant disregard for the dangers of a particular situation. An example of this would be dropping a brick off a bridge, landing on a person's head, killing them. Assuming there is no intention to cause really serious harm, murder does not arise. But the act of dropping the brick is itself criminal, and where a criminal and dangerous act causes death, that will (generally) constitute manslaughter. This form of manslaughter is also termed "unlawful act" or "constructive" manslaughter.
Under English law, where a person owes a duty of care (either by statute or by the neighbour principle [8] ) and is negligent to such a degree that consequently the law regards it as a crime [9] (namely the person has been grossly negligent) and that person causes the victim to die, they may be liable for gross negligence manslaughter. [10] The defendants in such cases are often people carrying out jobs that require special skills or care, such as doctors, teachers, police or prison officers, or electricians, who fail to meet the standard which could be expected from a reasonable person of the same profession. [11] In R v Bateman [12] the Court of Criminal Appeal held that gross negligence manslaughter involved the following elements:
The House of Lords in Seymour [13] sought to identify the mens rea for "motor manslaughter" (negligently causing death when driving a motor vehicle). Reference was made to R v Caldwell and R v Lawrence [14] [15] which held that a person was reckless if:
The conclusion was that for motor manslaughter (and, by implication, for all cases of gross negligence), it was more appropriate to adopt this definition of recklessness. Consequently, if the defendant created an obvious and serious risk of causing physical injury to someone, there could be liability whether there was simple inadvertence or conscious risk-taking. It was no longer a defence to argue that the negligence had not been gross.
In R v Adomako [16] an anaesthetist failed to notice that a tube had become disconnected from the ventilator and the patient died. Lord Mackay disapproved Seymour and held that the Bateman test of gross negligence was the appropriate test in manslaughter cases involving a breach of duty, allowing the jury to consider the accused's conduct in all the surrounding circumstances, and to convict only if the negligence was very serious. Individuals have a duty to act in the following situations:
In Attorney-General's Reference (No 2 of 1999), [20] a case on corporate manslaughter that arose out of the Southall rail crash, the Court of Appeal decided the defendant's subjective state of mind (i.e. whether there was conscious risk-taking) is irrelevant and, therefore, so is the question of recklessness, leaving the objective test as the only test for liability. Rose LJ said:
Although there may be cases where the defendant's state of mind is relevant to the jury's consideration when assessing the grossness and criminality of his conduct, evidence of his state of mind is not a pre-requisite to a conviction for manslaughter by gross negligence. The Adomako test is objective, but a defendant who is reckless as defined in Stone may well be the more readily found to be grossly negligent to a criminal degree. ...
In our judgment unless an identified individual's conduct, characterisable as gross criminal negligence, can be attributed to the company, the company is not, in the present state of the common law, liable for manslaughter.
Civil negligence rules are not apt to confer criminal liability; the identification principle remains the only basis in common law for corporate liability for gross negligence manslaughter (see imputation). This was the only persuasive authority for the law of manslaughter at large, but R v DPP, ex parte Jones , [21] which said that the test of negligent manslaughter is objective, confirmed Attorney General's Reference (No 2 of 1999) as a correct general statement of law.
Because of a reluctance by juries to convict when the charge was manslaughter, a statutory offence of "causing death by dangerous driving" was introduced. Following the Road Traffic Law Review Committee (1988), the Road Traffic Act 1991 abandoned recklessness in favour of the pre-statutory objective test of "dangerousness", i.e. whether the driving fell far below the standard of the competent and careful driver and was obviously dangerous in the opinion of such a driver. The Committee also recommended that manslaughter should be an optional charge for the more serious driving cases. There is the possibility of charging an aggravated taking without consent or, since 2008, causing death by careless or inconsiderate driving, for less seriously dangerous driving where death results. An equivalent, in many American states, to motor manslaughter is vehicular homicide. An equivalent to causing death by dangerous driving in Canada under the Criminal Code is causing death by criminal negligence.
Under English law, according to R v Creamer , [22] a person is guilty of involuntary manslaughter when he or she intends an unlawful act that is likely to do harm to the person, and death results which was neither foreseen nor intended. The name for this crime is 'manslaughter by an unlawful and dangerous act' (MUDA). The term 'constructive manslaughter' is commonly and correctly used as a synonym. Although the accused did not intend to cause serious harm or foresee the risk of doing so, and although an objective observer would not necessarily have predicted that serious harm would result, the accused's responsibility for causing death is constructed from the fault in committing what might have been a minor criminal act.
The case of R v Goodfellow [23] laid out a four-part requirement which if satisfied could lead to liability for MUDA. The person's action must:
A number of authorities clarify the test from R v Goodfellow:
In R v Dawson , [27] a petrol station attendant with a weak heart died of heart failure when the appellant attempted a robbery of the station. In judging whether this act was sufficiently dangerous, the Court of Appeal applied a test based on the "sober and reasonable" bystander who could be assumed to know that the use of a replica gun was likely to terrify people and so be a danger to those with a weak heart. Note the aggravated form of criminal damage with intent to endanger life under section 1(2) of the Criminal Damage Act 1971 which could provide the unlawful act if the damage actually causes death. But R v Carey, C and F [28] limits the scope of unlawful act manslaughter. An argument became violent and the first defendant punched and kicked one victim. The second defendant assaulted the deceased by pulling her hair back and punching her in the face. The third defendant assaulted another.
The deceased was one of the first to run away, after which she felt faint, and later died of a heart condition (ventricular fibrillation or dysrhythmia) which was congenital but which had not been diagnosed before her death. The unlawful act was said to be the affray and the judge held that it was legitimate to aggregate the violence by the other defendants in order to decide whether the affray had subjected the deceased to the threat of at least some physical harm, and so had been a cause of death. On appeal, it was judged to be inappropriate to hold the defendants liable for the death. There must be an unlawful act that was dangerous in the sense that sober and reasonable persons would recognise that the act was such as to subject Y to the risk of physical harm. In turn, that act must cause the death. When deciding whether an act is dangerous, knowledge of the victim's characteristics may be relevant.
In this case, no reasonable person would have been aware of the victim's heart condition, which distinguishes this case from Dawson, and from R v Watson [29] in which the victim's approximate age (he was 87 years old) and frail state would have been obvious to a reasonable person. A sober and reasonable person would not have foreseen that an apparently healthy person of 15 years would suffer shock as a result of it. The court held that the deceased's death was not caused by injuries that were a foreseeable result of the affray. The assault by the second defendant was an unlawful act causing death. The other two defendants could have been convicted by virtue of common purpose given that the death was an accidental departure from the general plan of the affray. But the Crown did not elect to present the case in this way, but pleaded the case as a public order group activity. The result would be that if anyone died in a general disturbance amounting to an affray, all those who participated could be convicted of manslaughter which would be against public policy. Deaths in a general disturbance are too remote to be caused by all participants.
Thus, a punch which causes a person to fall will almost inevitably satisfy the test of dangerousness, and where the victim falls and suffers a fatal head injury the accused is guilty of manslaughter. It is foreseeable that the victim is at risk of suffering some physical harm (albeit not serious harm) from such a punch and that is sufficient. Physical harm includes shock. The reason why the death resulting from the attempted robbery of the 60-year-old petrol station attendant was not manslaughter was that the attempted robbery was not dangerous in the relevant sense. It was not foreseeable that an apparently healthy 60-year-old man would suffer shock and a heart attack as a result of such an attempted robbery. But the jury properly found that it was foreseeable that an obviously frail and very old man was at risk of suffering shock leading to a heart attack as a result of a burglary committed at his home late at night.
In R v Charles James Brown , [30] following the break-up of his relationship with his girlfriend, at about 3 pm, the defendant sent a text message to his mother saying that he did not want to live any more. He then drove his car against the flow of traffic along the hard shoulder of the A1(M) at high speed, before moving into the carriageway, still accelerating and straddling the centre line. He then crashed, head on, into an oncoming car, killing the passenger and injuring many others in the resulting consequential crashes. A sentence of 10 years' detention in a young offender institution was upheld because although the intentional focus might have been only on suicide, the defendant must have known from the way he was driving that he would kill or injure at least one other person (thus enforcing an objective standard on the defendant).
The law on those who supply the (post) deceased with drugs had been uncertain until the case of R v Kennedy . [31] The defendant supplied heroin to a drug user that asked for something to help them sleep. An hour after administering the drug the victim died. Kennedy was found guilty of manslaughter and appealed on the grounds that there must be an unlawful act which caused the victim's death. In this case the defendant set up the drug and supplied it but did not administer it, therefore it was an act of the victim himself that caused his own death. Kennedy was acquitted of manslaughter. Prior to this House of Lords ruling, the lower courts (in particular the Court of Appeal) struggled to strike a balance between those suppliers considered to have administered the drug (in the subsequent cases, heroin) to the victim themselves, and those suppliers who simply "supply" the drug for the victim to then voluntarily administer themselves. [32]
Infanticide is a partial defence to manslaughter under the Infanticide Act 1938 (as amended by section 57 the Coroners and Justice Act 2009 to confirm the decision in R v Gore [33] ) and reduces the manslaughter to the crime of infanticide.
Manslaughter is an indictable-only offence.
A person guilty of manslaughter is liable to imprisonment for life or for any shorter term. [34]
For case law on sentencing see the Crown Prosecution Service sentencing manual:
The Sentencing Council set out a guideline for manslaughter (substituted for charge/finding of murder) by reason of an accepted defence of loss of control. It came in to effect on 1 November 2018. [39]
A nine-stage formula is to be used, for ideal legal compliance. [39] Stage 1, culpability, will set the sentencing "starting point". [39]
Notably the fourth stage is reduction for guilty pleas (such as by a plea bargain); the fifth is dangerousness. If the actions and/or psychological reports are adverse they may well meet the criteria in Chapter 5 of Part 12 of the Criminal Justice Act 2003 by which it would be appropriate to impose a life sentence (section 224A or section 225) or an extended sentence (section 226A). [39]
In R v Creamer , [22] the court said obiter that attempted manslaughter is not an offence known to law. [40]
Provocation in English law was abolished on 4 October 2010 [41] by section 56(1) of the Coroners and Justice Act 2009, [42] but replaced by the similar partial defence of "loss of control".
At common law, acts of provocation had to be actual violence towards the defendant; words could not amount to provocation. The two exceptions to this rule were a husband discovering his wife committing adultery and a father finding someone buggering his son. There were two limbs to the defence, first the defendant had to have actually been provoked, and second the provocation had to be such as would have made the reasonable man act as the defendant did. The Homicide Act 1957 removed all limits on what could amount to provocation and allowed it to include provocation from someone other than the victim, [43] and aimed at someone other than the accused. [44] Further the defence was not defeated by the fact that the defendant induced the provocation. [45] Section 56 [46] of the Coroners and Justice Act 2009 states that the common law defence of provocation is abolished and replaced by sections 54 and 55; and that section 3 of the Homicide Act 1957 is also abolished and replaced with sections 54 and 55.
This was a question of fact for the jury. The loss of control had to be sudden and temporary, [47] however it could be the result of slow burn; the final straw needed not be very bad as long as it led to an actual sudden and temporary loss of control. A delay between the act of provocation and the killing did not always defeat the defence, but often would. [48]
Under section 3 of the Homicide Act 1957 the second question to be answered by the jury in order for the defence to succeed was ‘whether the provocation was enough to make a reasonable man act as [the defendant] did?’. The reasonable man for the purposes of this test had the same sex and age as the defendant and shared such characteristics as affect the gravity of the provocation to the defendant, but characteristics irrelevant to the provocation such as unrelated mental disorders were not given to the reasonable man. [49] Finally, the reasonable man always had reasonable powers of self-control [50] and was never intoxicated. [51]
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: CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link)The defence of property is a common method of justification used by defendants who argue that they should not be held liable for any loss and injury that they have caused because they were acting to protect their property.
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."
In criminal law, criminal negligence is an offence that involves a breach of an objective standard of behaviour expected of a defendant. It may be contrasted with strictly liable offences, which do not consider states of mind in determining criminal liability, or offenses that requires mens rea, a mental state of guilt.
Assault occasioning grievous bodily harm is a term used in English criminal law to describe the severest forms of battery. It refers to two offences that are created by sections 18 and 20 of the Offences against the Person Act 1861. The distinction between these two sections is the requirement of specific intent for section 18; the offence under section 18 is variously referred to as "wounding with intent" or "causing grievous bodily harm with intent", whereas the offence under section 20 is variously referred to as "unlawful wounding", "malicious wounding" or "inflicting grievous bodily harm".
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.
In criminal law, a mistake of fact may sometimes mean that, while a person has committed the physical element of an offence, because they were labouring under a mistake of fact, they never formed the mental element. This is unlike a mistake of law, which is not usually a defense; law enforcement may or may not take for granted that individuals know what the law is.
Assault occasioning actual bodily harm is a statutory offence of aggravated assault in England and Wales, Northern Ireland, the Australian Capital Territory, New South Wales, Hong Kong and the Solomon Islands. It has been abolished in the Republic of Ireland and in South Australia, but replaced with a similar offence.
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.
Common assault is an offence in English law. It is committed by a person who causes another person to apprehend the immediate use of unlawful violence by the defendant. In England and Wales, the penalty and mode of trial for this offence is provided by section 39 of the Criminal Justice Act 1988.
The Homicide Act 1957 is an Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom. It was enacted as a partial reform of the common law offence of murder in English law by abolishing the doctrine of constructive malice, reforming the partial defence of provocation, and by introducing the partial defences of diminished responsibility and suicide pact. It restricted the use of the death penalty for murder.
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 excuse.
In the criminal law of Australia, self-defence is a legal defence to a charge of causing injury or death in defence of the person or, to a limited extent, property, or a partial defence to murder if the degree of force used was excessive.
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 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 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 defence.
In English law, diminished responsibility is one of the partial defenses that reduce the offense from murder to manslaughter if successful. This allows the judge sentencing discretion, e.g. to impose a hospital order under section 37 of the Mental Health Act 1983 to ensure treatment rather than punishment in appropriate cases. Thus, when the actus reus of death is accompanied by an objective or constructive version of mens rea, the subjective evidence that the defendant did intend to kill or cause grievous bodily harm because of a mental incapacity will partially excuse his conduct. Under s.2(2) of the Homicide Act 1957 the burden of proof is on the defendant to the balance of probabilities. The M'Naghten Rules lack a volitional limb of "irresistible impulse"; diminished responsibility is the volitional mental condition defense in English criminal law.
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.
The born alive rule is a common law legal principle that holds that various criminal laws, such as homicide and assault, apply only to a child that is "born alive". U.S. courts have overturned this rule, citing recent advances in science and medicine, and in several states feticide statutes have been explicitly framed or amended to include fetuses in utero. Abortion in Canada is still governed by the born alive rule, as courts continue to hold to its foundational principles. In 1996, the Law Lords confirmed that the rule applied in English law but that alternative charges existed in lieu, such as a charge of unlawful or negligent manslaughter instead of murder.
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.
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 Adomako[1994] UKHL 6, was a landmark United Kingdom criminal law case where the required elements to satisfy the legal test for gross negligence manslaughter at common law were endorsed and refined. It was held that in cases of manslaughter by criminal negligence involving a breach of duty the gross negligence test relied on by the Court of Appeal was sufficient and that it was not necessary to direct a jury to consider whether the recklessness definition should be applied. The test, as set out in R v Bateman 19 Cr. App. R.8 and Andrews v DPP [1937] AC 576, confirmed that there needed to be in existence a breach of duty of care where the serious and obvious risk of death was reasonably foreseeable and that the breach or omission in question caused actual death and that the conduct of the defendant, when all the circumstances were considered, was so bad as to amount to a criminal act or omission. The requirement to show that the defendant's breach of duty was "gross" helped develop the definition of gross negligence.