A person cannot be guilty of an offence for his actions alone; there must also be the requisite intention, knowledge, recklessness, or criminal negligence at the relevant time.
Criminal law recognizes recklessness as one of four main classes of mental state constituting mens rea elements to establish liability, namely: The tests for any mens rea element relies on an assessment of whether the accused had foresight of the prohibited consequences and desired to cause those consequences to occur.
These do not require a guilty mind and due diligence is not a defense but a person cannot be imprisoned for an absolute liability offense.
The accused is a social danger because they gamble with the safety of others, and, unless they exercised all possible due diligence, the fact they might have acted to try to avoid the injury from occurring is relevant only to mitigate the sentence.
When he set the blaze there were ten guests asleep inside the hotel, and though the fire was extinguished quickly, Caldwell was charged not only with arson, contrary to section 1(1) of the Criminal Damage Act 1971 (to which he pleaded guilty), but with the more serious charge of arson with intent to endanger human life, contrary to section 1(2) of that Act.
However Lord Diplock said at 354F that it would be proper to direct a jury that a defendant charged with an offence under section 1(1) of the Criminal Damage Act 1971 is "reckless as to whether or not any property would be destroyed or damaged" if: To that extent, the test is one of obviousness, i.e. if it would have been obvious to the reasonable person, the defendant will be punished for failing to foresee it.
The decision in Caldwell was followed in R v Lawrence [1982] AC 510[11] in which the defendant was charged with the offence of causing death by reckless driving contrary to section 1 of the Road Traffic Act 1972.
Following his speech in Caldwell at 354C, Lord Diplock said at 526E: Recklessness on the part of the doer of an act presupposes that there is something in the circumstances that would have drawn the attention of an ordinary prudent individual to the possibility that his act was capable of causing the kind of serious harmful consequences that the section that created the offence was intended to prevent, and that the risk of those harmful consequences occurring was not so slight that an ordinary prudent individual would feel justified in treating them as negligible.
[12] In Elliot v C (a minor)[13] a 14-year-old schoolgirl of low intelligence, who was tired and hungry, inadvertently burned down a garden shed.
It was further argued that the model direction breached Article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights in cases involving a minor or other persons of reduced capacity.
But, to judge the moral and legal culpability of a child by reference to the understanding and life experience of an adult is irrational and, therefore, unfair.
After a period of confusion, in R v Satnam and Kewal,[15] the Court of Appeal held that this test did not apply to the meaning of the word "reckless" in the definition of rape in section 1 of the Sexual Offences (Amendment) Act 1976.
In R v Prentice and Sullman, R v Adomako, R v Holloway,[16] the Court of Appeal ruled that the above statement of Lord Roskill was obiter and did not apply to cases of manslaughter consisting of breach of duty.
When R v Adomako[17] went to the House of Lords, it was said that, in cases of involuntary manslaughter, a trial judge need not direct a jury in accordance with the definition of recklessness in Lawrence.
Two boys, aged 11 and 12 years, were camping without their parents' permission when they entered the back yard of a shop in the early hours of the morning.