Background
In 1993, Bert Stone married Donna Stone and they lived together in the Okanagan Valley. He had previously been married two other times and had teenage children from his second marriage. Their relationship was a difficult one, where he was charged with physical abuse after previously trying to run Donna over in a parking lot in Winfield, BC. In 1994 he made arrangements to make a business trip to Vancouver and visit his son without telling his wife. When she found out what he planned to do, she insisted on going with him.
According to Bert Stone, the visit to his son was cut short when Donna threatened to lean on the car horn until the police arrived. He made a comment about getting a divorce, which greatly upset her. Bert drove into an abandoned lot and stopped the car. She began to yell and scream, and belittle him. He testified that:
- she just continued on and she just said that she couldn't stand to listen to me whistle, that every time I touched her, she felt sick, that I was a lousy fuck and that I had a little penis and that she's never going to fuck me again, and I'm just sitting there with my head down; and by this time, she's kneeling on the seat and she's yelling this in my face.
At this point Bert claimed that her voice began to fade away and a "whooshing" sensation came over him. The next thing he remembers is looking down at her body slumped over the seat and a knife in his hand. He had stabbed her 47 times. He hid her body in his truck's tool chest, left a note for Donna's daughter, and took off to Mexico. After a few weeks in Mexico he decided to return to Canada and turn himself in. He was charged with murder.
Mexico, officially the United Mexican States, is a country in the southern portion of North America. It is bordered to the north by the United States; to the south and west by the Pacific Ocean; to the southeast by Guatemala, Belize, and the Caribbean Sea; and to the east by the Gulf of Mexico. Covering almost 2,000,000 square kilometres (770,000 sq mi), the nation is the fifth largest country in the Americas by total area and the 13th largest independent state in the world. With an estimated population of over 120 million people, the country is the tenth most populous state and the most populous Spanish-speaking state in the world, while being the second most populous nation in Latin America after Brazil. Mexico is a federation comprising 31 states and Mexico City, a special federal entity that is also the capital city and its most populous city. Other metropolises in the state include Guadalajara, Monterrey, Puebla, Toluca, Tijuana and León.
In his defence, Stone pleaded insane automatism, non-insane automatism, lack of intent, and in the alternative, provocation. The judge allowed for a defence of insane automatism. The jury convicted him of manslaughter and sentenced him to four years. The verdict was upheld by the Court of Appeal.
The issue on appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada was
- whether the "defence" of sane automatism should have been left to the jury;
- whether the defence psychiatric report was properly ordered disclosed to the Crown; and
- whether the sentencing judge could consider provocation as a mitigating factor for manslaughter where the same provocation had already been considered in reducing the charge to manslaughter; and
- whether the sentence was fit and properly reflected the gravity of the offence and the moral culpability of the offender.
In a five to four decision, the Court upheld the conviction.
Opinion of the Court
Justice Bastarache wrote for the majority. He first distinguished between insane and non-insane automatism. The former was codified under section 16 of the Criminal Code and required that the involuntariness of the conduct to be the result of a "disease of the mind". A successful defence results in a verdict of not criminally responsible on account of mental disorder. The result of the latter is an acquittal.
To apply a defence of automatism the defence has an evidentiary burden to show the judge that the accused's actions were involuntary. The judge will then allow the jury to choose which of the two types of automatism is most appropriate. The question is whether the automatism was the result of a mental disorder or not.
Bastarache examined the meaning of a mental disorder. He identified two approaches under section 16. First is the "internal cause" theory in which the judge compares "the accused's automatistic reaction to the way one would expect a normal person to react in order to determine whether the condition the accused claims to have suffered from is a disease of the mind." This takes into account the triggering event, and whether a normal person might have entered into an automatistic state. For example, an extremely shocking event would reasonably turn someone automatistic.
The second approach is the "continuing danger" theory in which a condition that is likely to present a continuing danger to the public would constitute a mental disorder. These two theories, argued Bastarache, are not meant to be mutually exclusive and should both be considered in the application of the defence (Bastarache also mentioned the possibility of considering other policy concerns when "consideration of the internal cause and continuing danger factors alone [do] not permit a conclusive answer to the disease of the mind question" (at para 218).
On the facts, the trial judge had found that only the mental disorder automatism defence applied; the triggering effect for Stone was not something that would reasonably be expected from a normal person. Consequently, his defence should fail.
The insanity defense, also known as the mental disorder defense, is an affirmative defense by excuse in a criminal case, arguing that the defendant is not responsible for his or her actions due to an episodic or persistent psychiatric disease at the time of the criminal act. This is contrasted with an excuse of provocation, in which defendant is responsible, but the responsibility is lessened due to a temporary mental state. It is also contrasted with a finding that a defendant cannot stand trial in a criminal case because a mental disease prevents them from effectively assisting counsel, from a civil finding in trusts and estates where a will is nullified because it was made when a mental disorder prevented a testator from recognizing the natural objects of their bounty, and from involuntary civil commitment to a mental institution, when anyone is found to be gravely disabled or to be a danger to themselves or to others.
The M'Naghten rule is any variant of the 1840s jury instruction in a criminal case when there is a defense of insanity:
that every man is to be presumed to be sane, and ... that to establish a defence on the ground of insanity, it must be clearly proved that, at the time of the committing of the act, the party accused was labouring under such a defect of reason, from disease of the mind, as not to know the nature and quality of the act he was doing; or if he did know it, that he did not know he was doing what was wrong.
Actus reus, sometimes called the external element or the objective element of a crime, is the Latin term for the "guilty act" which, when proved beyond a reasonable doubt in combination with the mens rea, "guilty mind", produces criminal liability in the common law-based criminal law jurisdictions of England and Wales, Canada, Australia, India, Kenya, Pakistan, South Africa, New Zealand, Scotland, Nigeria, Ghana, Ireland, Israel and the United States of America. In the United States of America, some crimes also require proof of an attendant circumstance.
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 person 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".
Battered woman syndrome (BWS) emerged in the 1990s from several murder cases in England in which women had killed violent partners in response to what they claimed was cumulative abuse, rather than in response to a single provocative act. Feminist groups, particularly Southall Black Sisters and Justice for Women, challenged the legal definition of provocation, and in a series of appeals against murder convictions secured the courts' recognition of battered woman syndrome. An early work describing the syndrome is Lenore E. Walker's The Battered Woman (1979).
R v Daviault [1994] 3 S.C.R. 63, is a Supreme Court of Canada decision on the availability of the defence of intoxication for "general intent" criminal offences. The Leary rule which eliminated the defence was found unconstitutional in violation of both section 7 and 11(d) of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Instead, intoxication can only be used as a defence where it is so extreme that it is akin to automatism or insanity.
Voluntary manslaughter is the killing of a human being in which the offender acted during the heat of passion, under circumstances that would cause a reasonable person to become emotionally or mentally disturbed to the point that they can't reasonably control their emotions. Voluntary manslaughter is one of two main types of manslaughter, the other being involuntary manslaughter.
The criminal law of Canada is under the exclusive legislative jurisdiction of the Parliament of Canada. The power to enact criminal law is derived from section 91(27) of the Constitution Act, 1867. Most criminal laws have been codified in the Criminal Code, as well as the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act, Youth Criminal Justice Act and several other peripheral statutes.
R v Latimer, [2001] 1 SCR 3 was a decision by the Supreme Court of Canada in the controversial case of Robert Latimer, a Saskatchewan farmer convicted of murdering his disabled daughter Tracy Latimer. The case had sparked an intense national debate as to the ethics of what was claimed as a mercy killing. In its decision, the Supreme Court ruled that the crime could not be justified through the defence of necessity, and found that, despite the special circumstances of the case, the lengthy prison sentence given to Latimer was not cruel and unusual and therefore not a breach of section 12 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The Court also ruled that Latimer was not denied rights to jury nullification, as no such rights exist. The prison sentence was thus upheld, although the Court specifically noted that the federal government had the power to pardon him.
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.
R v Parks, [1992] 2 S.C.R. 871 is a leading Supreme Court of Canada decision on the criminal automatism defence.
In English law, provocation was a mitigatory defence alleging a total loss of control as a response to another's provocative conduct sufficient to convert what would otherwise have been murder into manslaughter. It does not apply to any other offence. It was abolished on 4 October 2010 by section 56(1) of the Coroners and Justice Act 2009, but replaced by a relatively similar defence of 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, the usual 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 BCE.
Bratty v Attorney-General for Northern Ireland [1963] AC 386, [1961] 3 All ER 523, [1961] UKHL 3 is a House of Lords decision relating to non-insane automatism. The court decided that medical evidence is needed to prove that the defendant was not aware of what they were doing, and if this is available, the burden of proof lies with the prosecution to prove that intention was present.
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.
Insanity in English law is a defence to criminal charges based on the idea that the defendant was unable to understand what he was doing, or, that he was unable to understand that what he was doing was wrong.
South African criminal law is the body of national law relating to crime in South Africa. In the definition of Van der Walt et al, a crime is "conduct which common or statute law prohibits and expressly or impliedly subjects to punishment remissible by the state alone and which the offender cannot avoid by his own act once he has been convicted." Crime involves the infliction of harm against society. The function or object of criminal law is to provide a social mechanism with which to coerce members of society to abstain from conduct that is harmful to the interests of society.
State v. Dumlao is a 1986 criminal Hawaii Intermediate Court of Appeals case appealing a murder conviction on the ground that the court's decision to not issue a jury instruction for voluntary manslaughter based on extreme emotional disturbance was a reversible error. The court found that the Model Penal Code required a subjective analysis of whether provocation is adequate from the defendant's perspective. Based on medical testimony that Dumlao suffered from "paranoid personality disorder", which included symptoms of "unwarranted suspiciousness" and hypersensitivity, the Court granted Dumlao's appeal, holding that his actions on the night he killed his mother in law had been "reasonable" from his perspective.
