Summary
Summary Unlawful act manslaughter - Criminal law
- Module
- A2 Unit G153 - Criminal Law
- Institution
- OCR
Summary of unlawful act manslaughter for OCR, written by an A* student
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Involuntary - someone is dead but there is no malice aforethoughtAR: D commits an unlawful and dangerous act that causes death.
MR: D only needs MR for the initial unlawful act.
Unlawful act: the act must be a crime within itself and if any element is
missing then it is not UAM (Lamb). It must be an act, not an omission (Lowe).
The unlawful act doesn’t need to be aimed at the V (Mitchell). The unlawful
act doesn’t need to be aimed at a person at all (Goodfellow).
The unlawful act must also be dangerous: Objective bystander test for
dangerous comes from the case of Church, would a sober and reasonable
bystander have realised the risk of harm? Dawson - sober and reasonable
person only needs to see the risk of some harm, the risk must be of physical
harm, the bystander must have the same knowledge as D at the scene. Watson
- if D learns anything throughout the unlawful act about the dangerousness
of their actions, then the S & R bystander learns it too. R v JM & SM - no need
to foresee the particular type of harm, it is enough that the S & R person
would foresee some harm.
The act must cause death: D must be a factual and legal cause and there must
be no new intervening acts to break the chain of causation. (Causation cases
and rules)
MR: only needs MR for initial unlawful act, e.g. if a battery caused death then
D only needed to have intended to or be reckless as to the application of
unlawful force to be liable for UAM. Newbury & Jones - irrelevant whether D
saw any risk of harm.
“I only hit him once” scenario - the act was unlawful as it was a battery, it is a
dangerous act as it can be foreseen that there will be injury from a punch,
there are no causation issues because although there was extensive surgery,
there is no evidence of medical negligence, the MR applies because he had the
MR for the initial unlawful act.
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