Homicide in English law (original) (raw)
English law contains homicide offences – those acts involving the death of another person. For a crime to be considered homicide, it must take place after the victim's legally recognised birth, and before their legal death. There is also the usually uncontroversial requirement that the victim be under the "Queen's peace". The death must be causally linked to the actions of the defendant. Since the abolition of the year and a day rule, there is no maximum time period between any act being committed and the victim's death, so long as the former caused the latter.
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| dbo:abstract | English law contains homicide offences – those acts involving the death of another person. For a crime to be considered homicide, it must take place after the victim's legally recognised birth, and before their legal death. There is also the usually uncontroversial requirement that the victim be under the "Queen's peace". The death must be causally linked to the actions of the defendant. Since the abolition of the year and a day rule, there is no maximum time period between any act being committed and the victim's death, so long as the former caused the latter. There are two general types of homicide, murder and manslaughter. Murder requires an intention to kill or an intention to commit grievous bodily harm. If this intention is present but there are certain types of mitigating factors – loss of control, diminished responsibility, or pursuance of a suicide pact – then this is voluntary manslaughter. There are two types of involuntary manslaughter. Firstly, it may be "constructive" or "unlawful act" manslaugher, where a lesser but inherently criminal and dangerous act has caused the death. Alternatively, manslaughter may be caused by gross negligence, where the defendant has broken a duty of care over the victim, where that breach has led to the death, and is sufficiently gross as to warrant criminalisation. (en) |
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| dbo:wikiPageExternalLink | http://www.legal-tools.org/doc/3c33e0/pdf/ https://doi.org/10.1177/00220183211004068 http://ssrn.com/abstract=2063709 |
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| dbp:author | Dennis J. Baker, Glanville Williams: Textbook of Criminal Law, at paragraph 10-024. (en) Baker, Dennis J, Omissions Liability for Homicide Offences: Reconciling R V Kennedy with R V Evans . 74 Journal of Criminal Law 310. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2063709 (en) |
| dbp:quote | Murder is when a man of sound memory and of the age of discretion unlawfully killeth within any country of the realm any reasonable creature in rerum natura under the King's peace with malice aforethought, either expressed by the party or implied by law, [so as the party wounded, or hurt, etc die of the wound or hurt, etc within a year and a day after the same]. (en) |
| dbp:source | – definition of murder given by Edward Coke (en) |
| dbp:text | "R v Evans [2009] EWCA Crim 650, [2009] 1 WLR 1999 holds that if a person merely facilitates another to create a dangerous situation for himself, that person may be held criminally liable for a homicide offence if that self-endangerment results in death. Evans's sister made an intervening choice to self-inject and it was her independent self-injection that was the direct cause of the dangerous situation. Evans's pre-existing duty of care was grounded on her act of supply and her awareness of the fact that her act of supply had facilitated the creation of a dangerous and life-threatening situation. Evans did not create the dangerous situation, but rather she merely made an indirect causative contribution to the dangerous situation. Furthermore, if she had merely supplied the drugs and had left the scene, and therefore had remained ignorant of the fact that her act of supply had resulted in a dangerous overdose situation, her act of mere supply per se would not have been sufficient for a conviction of gross negligence manslaughter." (en) "In R. v. Evans, Gemma Evans, a 24-year-old woman, purchased heroin and supplied her 16-year-old sister, Carly. Carly self-injected in a house in which she resided with Evans and her mother. After injecting the drug she developed and complained of symptoms consistent with an overdose. Evans appreciated that Carly’s condition was very serious and indicative of an overdose and, together with her mother, Andrea Townsend, who was also convicted of manslaughter, believed that she was responsible for Carly’s care. “The appellant described in a later interview with the police that she had seen that Carly’s lips had turned blue, that she was ‘in a mess’, and was incapable of responding to attempts to speak to her. The appellant and her mother decided not to seek medical assistance because they feared that they themselves and possibly Carly would get into trouble.” Instead, they put Carly in bed with the hope that she would make a miraculous recovery. The defendant and her mother checked on Carly occasionally and slept in the same room, but tragically, Carly died during the night. The medical evidence demonstrated that the cause of death was heroin poisoning. Evans and Townsend were charged with manslaughter.... Lord Judge C.J. held that Gemma Evans assisted Carly Evans to create a dangerous situation and was aware of the danger she assisted Carly to bring about for herself and that these two factors gave rise to a duty of reasonable rescue. The mother was convicted on the basis of her parental duty, which required her to take reasonable steps to summon assistance. Since Evans was an older half-sister, she was not covered by the parental duty doctrine. Instead, a new law had to be minted to catch her conduct. The new law being that mere assistance gives rise to duty of care. Since Evans assisted her sister’s overdose by supplying the drug she had a duty to summon help once she realised her sister was in peril. This category of duty is a newly minted one. Arguably, the courts cannot create further situations where a duty will be imposed the breach of which will amount to manslaughter. Hence, the categories should be regarded as closed. Cases not covered by the aforementioned duties should not give rise to a duty of care. It is arguable that since the conduct in R. v. Evans is not covered by the R. v. Miller doctrine , nor by the category of duty as set down in R. v. Stone, the Court of Appeal should have held that Evans had no duty of care. There is nothing wrong with applying R. v. Miller to a manslaughter case, but the court extended the R. v. Miller doctrine to cover mere facilitation, and then applied that new doctrine to manslaughter. The category of duty created in R. v. Evans seems to contravene the ruling in R. v. Rimmington, which holds that judges cannot extend common law offences to cover new forms of conduct. It is one thing to apply an existing doctrine to new facts, and another to apply it to conceptually different conduct such as assistance rather than perpetration." (en) |
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| dct:subject | dbc:Criminal_homicide dbc:English_criminal_law |
| rdfs:comment | English law contains homicide offences – those acts involving the death of another person. For a crime to be considered homicide, it must take place after the victim's legally recognised birth, and before their legal death. There is also the usually uncontroversial requirement that the victim be under the "Queen's peace". The death must be causally linked to the actions of the defendant. Since the abolition of the year and a day rule, there is no maximum time period between any act being committed and the victim's death, so long as the former caused the latter. (en) |
| rdfs:label | Homicide in English law (en) |
| owl:sameAs | freebase:Homicide in English law wikidata:Homicide in English law https://global.dbpedia.org/id/4muEW |
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