Involuntary Manslaughter Flashcards
What is involuntary manslaughter?
• Covers a wide range of circumstances:
- Top end, behaviour is highly blameworthy, where death or serious
injury could be foreseen.
- Bottom end, careless behaviour, which may be considered only just blameworthy enough.
• Maximum sentence is life; minimum, non-custodial.
• Two ways of committing involuntary manslaughter: unlawful act manslaughter, gross negligence manslaughter.
Elements of Unlawful Act manslaughter:
• The defendant must do the unlawful act.
• The act must be dangerous on an objective test.
• It must cause death.
• The defendant must have the required mens rea for the unlawful act.
• A civil tort is not enough, R v Franklin (1883).
• There must be a criminal unlawful act, R v Lamb (1967).
• An omission is also not enough, R v Lowe (1973).
• Along with non-fatal offences, any criminal act can lead to finding unlawful act manslaughter:
- Arson, R v Goodfellow (1986).
- Criminal damage, DPP v Newbury and Jones (1976).
- Burglary, R v Watson (1989).
How do you define a ‘dangerous act’ and an ‘awareness of harm’?
• In an objective test, the act must be dangerous and if a sober and reasonable person recognises some harm relating to the risk, then this is satisfied. R v Church (1965).
• It is not necessary for the defendant to realise the risk of harm. R v Larkin (1943), R v JM and SM (2012).
• Risk of harm must refer to physical harm, R v Dawson (1985), but the defendant must also be aware of the victim’s frailty and the consequences of physical harm to them, R v Watson (1989).
• Burglary is not usually dangerous, although if carried out in a particular way, this can be taken into account, R v Bristow, Dunn and Delay (2013)
What is the causatioan and mens rea for unlawful act manslaughter?
• Causation is the same for murder, although an intervening act breaks the chain of causation.
• The issue of the defendant supplying drugs and then injecting the drug into the victim appears in R v Cato (1976), R v Dalby (1982) and R v Kennedy (2007).
• For the required mens rea for the unlawful act, it’s not necessary for the defendant to realise the act is either dangerous or indeed, unlawful. DPP v Newbury and Jones (1976).
What is ‘Gross Negligence Manslaughter’?
• When the defendant owes the victim a duty of care but breaches it in such a serious way that the victim dies, R v Adomako (1994)
What is the duty of care in gross negligence manslaughter?
• Must exist for the purposes of the criminal law.
• Caparo test:
1. Proximity of relationship.
2. Reasonable foreseeability
of harm.
3. Is it fair, just and reasonable to impose a duty of care?
• Acts OR omissions can form the basis of gross negligence manslaughter (GNM). R v Singh (1999), R v Litchfield (1997).
What constitutes as creating a state of affairs and duties through relationship to victim
• This is when the defendant creates a situation where a duty of care will exist.
• In R v Evans (2009), the defendants, the mother and half-sister of the victim were convicted of GNM when they failed to call for help after V had overdosed. D claimed she did not owe a duty to her half-sister, but the Court of Appeal upheld her conviction on the basis that she had created a state of affairs by supplying the drug and failed in her duty of care when she hadn’t called for help.
• In R v Stone & Dobinson (1977), the defendants, who were mentally slow, were, convicted of manslaughter because they had failed in their duty to care for an anorexic sister.
• Causation is important, because it must be proved that the breach of duty caused the death.
Gross Negligence
• For a conviction of GNM, the negligence has to be extreme (gross).
• In R v Bateman (1925), the defendant’s actions were not grossly negligent,
but in R v Adomako (1994), they were.
• A test must be established to determine that the accused’s actions go
beyond a matter of compensation and that they become a criminal matter.
• One of the problems arising from the test is that it is up to juries to decide the appropriate standard for ‘gross’ negligence which can obviously be very subjective.
• In both Adomako and Stone & Dobinson, whilst the ‘risk of death’ was not clear, the test was expressed as the risk being to the ‘health and welfare’ of the victim.
• Confusion over ‘risk of death’ has now been cleared up by the Court of Appeal, R v Misra and Srivastava (2004).
