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Mens Rea Outline

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11 views2 pages

Mens Rea Outline

Uploaded by

Iqra Asif
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Criminal Law

LA1010
Mens Rea

Intention
Intention requires the highest degree of fault of all the levels of mens rea. A person who intends to commit a crime,
can generally be said to be more culpable than one who acts recklessly.

Intention differs from motive or desire (Per Lord Bridge R v Moloney [1985]). Thus, a person who kills a loved one
dying from a terminal illness to relieve pain and suffering may well act out of good motives. Nevertheless, this does
not prevent them having the necessary intention to kill (R v Inglis [2011]).

Direct Intention
Most cases will be quite straight forward and involve direct intent. Direct intent can be said to exist where the
defendant embarks on a course of conduct to bring about a result which in fact occurs. E.g., D intends to kill his
wife. To achieve that result he gets a knife from the kitchen, sharpens it and then stabs her, killing her. The
conduct achieves the desired result. Antony Duff has provided a test for characterizing this state of mind. The test
is whether a given actor would treat his actions as a failure if the relevant consequence did not occur.

Oblique (or Woollin) Intention


Oblique intent can be said to exist where the defendant embarks on a course of conduct to bring about a desired
result, knowing that the consequence of his actions will also bring about another result. E.g., D intends to kill his
wife. He knows she is going to be on a particular airplane and places a bomb on that airplane. He knows that his
actions will result in the death of the other passengers and crew of the airplane even though that may not be part
of his desire in carrying out the action. In this situation D is no less culpable in killing the passengers and crew
than in killing his wife as he knows that the deaths will happen because of his actions.

The current test of oblique intent (R v Woollin [1999]):

"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 find 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."

The decision is one for the jury to be reached upon a consideration of all the evidence.

Recklessness
The traditional meaning of recklessness is the deliberate running of an unjustified risk of which D was aware. This is
a subjective test – Cunningham.

It is quite possible to be aware of things which might happen without explicitly thinking about them (foreseeing them)
at the time of acting – that’s why we do not put our hands in fires and other heat sources.

Parker [1977]: the defendant, after a bad day at the office, slammed down the receiver on the cradle of a defective
public telephone in frustration, which broke the telephone. He was fined for the damage caused and he appealed. The
Court of Appeal upheld the fine, saying that if D did not think about the risk of damage before he slammed down the
telephone then ‘he was, in effect, deliberately closing his mind to the obvious – the obvious being that damage in these
circumstances was inevitable’.

The Court concluded:


A man is reckless in the sense required when he carried [sic] out a deliberate act…closing his mind to the obvious
fact that there is some risk of damage resulting from that act but nevertheless continuing in the performance of that
act.
Negligence
Negligence is the idea of falling below a reasonable standard. It is a type of objective fault. You take the reasonable
person approach. A person is negligent if he is not able to comply with an objective standard of behaviour set by the
law.

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