English criminal law

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 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.

[13] In many countries in Europe and North America, Good Samaritan laws also exist, which criminalize failure to help someone in distress (e.g. a drowning child).

For instance, if P gives his friend Q a playful slap on the head, but Q suffers from a rare cranial condition and dies, then P can be guilty of manslaughter regardless of how unlucky he is to have bickered with Q.

[19] For instance, if emergency medics dropped a stab victim on the way to the hospital and performed the wrong resuscitation, the attacker would not be absolved of the crime.

[20] The interplay between causation and criminal responsibility is notoriously difficult, and many outcomes are criticized for their harshness to the unwitting defendant and sidestepping of hospitals' or the victim's own liability.

Together with an actus reus, mens rea forms the bedrock of criminal law, although strict liability offenses have encroached on this notion.

R v Mohan [1975] 2 All ER 193, intention defined as "a decision to bring about... [the actus reus] no matter whether the accused desired that consequence of his act or not."

In R v Woolin,[22] a man in a fit of temper threw his three-month-old son onto a wall, causing head injuries from which he died.

All torts committed by employees in the course of employment will attribute liability to their company even if acting wholly outside authority, so long as there is some temporal and close connection to work.

[31] But despite strict liability in tort, civil remedies are in some instances insufficient to provide a deterrent to a company pursuing business practices that could seriously injure the life, health and environment of other people.

Even with additional regulation by government bodies, such as the Health and Safety Executive or the Environment Agency, companies may still have a collective incentive to ignore the rules in the knowledge that the costs and likelihood of enforcement is weaker than potential profits.

Criminal sanctions remain problematic, for instance if a company director had no intention to harm anyone, no mens rea, and managers in the corporate hierarchy had systems to prevent employees committing offences.

This creates a criminal offence for manslaughter, meaning a penal fine of up to 10 per cent of turnover against companies whose managers conduct business in a grossly negligent fashion, resulting in deaths.

The requirements are usually more lax, for instance, being "an abnormality of mind" which "substantially impair[s] mental responsibility for his acts and omission in doing or being a party to the killing.

"Defect of reason" means much more than, for instance, absent mindedness making a lady walk from a supermarket without paying for a jar of mincemeat.

One may suddenly fall ill, into a dream like state as a result of post traumatic stress,[45] or even be "attacked by a swarm of bees" and go into an automatic spell.

[46] However to be classed as an "automaton" means there must have been a total destruction of voluntary control, which does not include a partial loss of consciousness as the result of driving for too long.

But automatism is no defence to other crimes (i.e. of basic intent, e.g. manslaughter, assault and battery) if the defendant was reckless in becoming automatismic or it happens through alcohol or illegal drugs.

Technically, intoxication is not a defence, but negates the mens rea for specific intent offenses (e.g. it commutes a murder sentence to manslaughter).

[52] On the other hand, if someone becomes involuntarily intoxicated, because his drink is laced or spiked, then the question is whether the normal mens rea was present at the incident's time.

She was hit in the back, and Mr Clegg was sentenced for murder because by then the car had passed, the force was excessive and there was no justification for self-defence.

For instance, as the notorious case of R v Martin[57] shows, shooting a teenager in the back with a shotgun several times as he tries to escape is not a justified or proportionate exercise of self-defensive force for the Norfolk farmer, even if robbers had trespassed on his property.

In R v Howe it was held that to allow the defence of duress as a defence to murder would, in the words of Lord Hailsham, withdraw the protection of the criminal law from the innocent victim and cast the cloak of its protection upon the coward and the poltroon - ordinary people ought to be prepared to give up their lives to the person making the threat in preference to killing an innocent.

The men were sentenced to hang, but public opinion, especially among seafarers, was outraged and overwhelmingly supportive of the crew's right to preserve their own lives.

In Johnson v Phillips [1975], Justice Wein stated that a police constable would be entitled to direct motorists to disobey road traffic regulations if this was reasonably necessary for the protection of life or property.

In a later case, Woods v Richards,[69] Justice Eveleigh stated that the defence of necessity depended on the degree of emergency which existed or the alternative danger to be averted.

In all criminal trials, there are a number of procedural protections for defendants, stemming from both common law and the obligations of the European Convention on Human Rights, particularly Article 6.

These include the presumption of innocence (as expounded in the 1935 case of Woolmington v DPP), the right to silence (although qualified by the adverse inference that can be drawn under provisions of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994), and the qualified rule against double jeopardy[76] (under the Criminal Justice Act 2003, a second trial after a not guilty verdict can only occur when authorised by the Court of Appeal).

[79] Some cases and sources concerning criminal procedure: After the jury or magistrate(s) decide on guilt, the court determine the sentence of an offender.