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).
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 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.
[3] Whether the abnormality substantially impaired the defendant's mental responsibility for the killing is a question of degree for the jury.
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".
[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).
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.
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.
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 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
[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".
The two exceptions to this rule were a husband discovering his wife committing adultery and a father finding someone buggering his son.