Actus Reus - Criminal Law Revision

Hello everybody and welcome back to The Learning Academy. This video is a little bit of an experiment. We're going to be talking about an element of the criminal law but we're going to be doing it in something of a revision-based format. We're going to do it as a bit of a revision guide and I'm basically going to just go over this topic, explain the elements of this topic and this is, like I said, a bit of a test to see whether or not people are into the way in these videos in this format. I'll still be doing the normal videos as they are but this will be a little bit more of an overview of a major topic that takes a lot longer than just one or two videos to cover. And the topic that we're covering is the actus reus of a criminal offence. There are two sort of ways in which we've split this topic up. We've split it up first into just a sort of general introduction and then we've talked about the elements of the actus reus down here and we will just go through each of them a bit by bit and I will talk about them as we go through. So if we begin up in this corner here, as a basic introduction, what this really is what we're talking about is the idea of the actus reus forming one of the elements of criminal liability. Now the elements of criminal liability are the actus reus of an offence and the mens rea of an offence. Now the phrase actus reus simply means a guilty act. Now while this is true for the most part it does not necessarily mean that it is only an act that can fulfil the actus reus of an offence. Sometimes crimes can be committed through the failure to act, this being an omission, something that we will get to when we get down this list in a second when we go down to a different part of the topic. Now in order to construct criminal liability there needs to be the concurrence or the coincidence of an actus reus and for the most part the mens rea of an offence. The concept of mens rea refers to the guilty mind and it derives out of the Latin maxim actus non facit ream nisi mensit rea which can simply be translated, if you were to excuse my poor translation from Latin, it simply is translated to mean quote the fact is not guilty unless the mind is guilty. So really there is a concurrence, there is a coincidence of the act itself being committed with the prerequisite mens rea and each and every single crime that we cover in the criminal law will have its own definition of the actus reus and its definition of the mens rea. So for example murder would be the act of killing another individual, taking somebody's life, that is the act, that is the actus reus, the guilty act. But it has to be done so with divorce also with a prerequisite mens rea. The mens rea for murder for the most part is an intent to kill or to cause grievous bodily harm and for the most part that constructs the crime of murder. Now there are exceptions, you can commit murder by failing to act with a certain amount of mens rea and so you so there are some elements that we need to be thinking about there but it's a nice and useful way to illustrate the point when we talk about the actus reus on the one hand and the mens rea on the other hand. In terms of some cases to illustrate these different points, if we go here the case of Arendella is a very interesting one because what this case does is it illustrates the fact that the actus reus is actually a fundamental part of criminal liability. You cannot be convicted of a crime for which you have not acted unlawfully. If you have not committed the act itself then you cannot be guilty of the offence. It is the act itself which really hinges the existence of criminal liability or not and this case gives us an interesting illustration of this because what this case does is it shows that the defendant actually had a guilty mind. He had intended to commit an offence and so he had the prerequisite mens rea but he in fact had not actually committed the offence itself. He had not actually committed the actus reus which is really what is hinged on. So the facts of this case are as follows the defendant in this case the defendant had arranged to make a sale on a car. The main issue here was to do with the sale and the claim that he had made that there had been no outstanding financial obligations attached to the car when in reality he had taken a mortgage out of the car on the car should I say to a financial company. Without the knowledge of the defendant the agreement in fact to take this mortgage out had actually been void and so the result was that there were no financial outstanding financial obligations on the vehicle. So he had intended to commit fraud fundamentally. He wanted to essentially lie and say that there had been no obligations when in fact he'd taken a mortgage out but in reality the agreement was void so there actually wasn't a mortgage taken out. So when he was prosecuted for obtaining by false pretenses which is just another fancy way of saying fraud they were unable to have any criminal liability attached to it. This is owing to the fact that he actually hadn't have committed an offence. He didn't commit an offence despite the fact he was intending to. He had a guilty mind but he did not have a guilty act. The next case here the case here of Bratty versus the Attorney General for illustrates the fact that the actus reus requires that an act is done voluntarily. Okay so there is no remit within the criminal law to allow for criminal liability to exist where an individual had not consciously acted in in the creation of or the or the facilitation of an unlawful act itself. And this is illustrated in the following quote that is established in this case. They say quote the requirement that it it being the crime of murder should be a voluntary act is essential not only in not only in a murder case but also in every criminal case. No act is punishable if it is done involuntarily and an involuntary act in this context means an act which is done by the muscles without control of the mind such as a spasm a reflex or a convulsion or an act that is done by a person who is not conscious of what he is doing such as an act done while suffering from concussion. So for example this is a case of murder but if we take another example if I was standing next to another individual and my muscle was to spasm in my arm and I was to accidentally spasm a muscle and hit this other person and maybe break their nose accidentally okay this would not constitute a battery or an assault or an assault occasioning actual bodily harm. The reason for this is because I had no control over my actions there that was the result of a muscle spasm or a reflex without any control of my mind and the result therefore is that there has to be a certain amount of voluntariness in the establishment of criminal liability which is what that passage illustrates and what is illustrated in the case here of Bratty versus the Attorney General for Northern Ireland. Now with this being said this gives us a basic introduction and a basic overview of what we mean when we are talking about the act itself the actus reis. If we come down here we can think about the various different elements of the actus reis. One such element of the actus reis is known as an omission okay. Now we have mentioned already that the actus reis of an offence does not necessarily have to require that the criminal conduct be a positive act. In some circumstances the actus reis of an offence can also be an omission. Now what is an omission? An omission is simply a failure to act. Now you will generally cover omissions in two different core modules. You'll either cover them first if you do criminal law first or if you do the law of tort first because you can also have negligent claims brought against you in the law of tort for omissions that are committed. So depending on which of the two modules you do first will depend on whether or not you do it in criminal law first or in the law of tort first. But fundamentally an omission is a failure to act and given that an omission is a failure to act in a particular circumstance there are some instances where a crime cannot be committed by way of an omission. So there are some crimes that do not allow for liability to arise out of an omission okay. So an example of a crime that can be committed through an omission is the crime of murder. You can murder somebody by omission. Assuming that you have the prerequisite mens rea, assuming you have the guilty mind, a defendant may be liable for murder if they have committed an act which kills a person. So if they actually positively do something to kill somebody, so for example they could stab them or hit them very hard around the head etc etc. Alternatively the defendant may be liable if they, intending to kill the victim, leave them in a situation where they will die as a result of their failure to act. And this is what is illustrated in a number of these cases that we have here. So the first case here, the case of Gibbons and Proctor, is a case where we have two defendants. We have D1 and D2 okay. These are both parents. The D1 is the father of the victim, D2 is the stepmother of the victim, who has by extension de facto parental responsibility in the similar way as D1. The two had deliberately failed to feed the victim, leaving them to die as a result of their of their negligence and as a result of their omission okay. They died of starvation. The result was they were both convicted of murder. They had intended to leave this individual without food, the victim or the child of this father, and so the result of which is that they died. And so even though they didn't commit a positive act, they didn't do a thing to the child to kill them, they left them in a situation in which they had responsibility for them and so the result of which is that they were convicted of Generally speaking okay, for the criminal law an omission is something that is often not criminalized okay. We do not criminalize the failure to do something or the lack of action in a particular circumstance. The same can also be said for the law of tort. Negligence cases in the law of tort are often representative of quite a high standard if we're talking about an omission rather than an act. Because generally speaking we do not criminalize omissions, we do not place liability on omissions for the most part. There's a reason number of reasons why that this may be the case. It can be difficult, potentially even impossible in a number of circumstances to prove the causation from a failure to act to potential criminal wrongdoing. We'll get to causation in a second. It also violates the general principle of autonomy which is respected in the law generally and also it is often very difficult to enforce and uphold. In circumstances where we're talking about omissions in relation to the law of tort there could be an infinite number of things that people could do to prevent a negligent action from happening or there could be an infinite number of things that a person could do that could prevent a crime from taking place and so the result here is if we had a 100% omissions policy where we could criminalize any omission then we could theoretically criminalize anybody and everybody for failing to do something which could have protected an individual and which obviously would have required a quite a significant amount of foresight, something that we do not have access to. Now the exceptions to the general rule however are as follows. The offence in question that is being charged, the defendant who is being charged is capable of being committed by way of an omission. That's the first step that you have to think about when considering whether or not liability can arise out of an omission. If the crime in question cannot be done without an act itself then it cannot be committed by way of an omission. So theft for example is a crime which requires you to actually do something. You The second point is that the defendant has some kind of legal duty to perform an action. This can either be from the common law or the statute law or even from a contractual obligation. So there has to be some kind of legal duty to perform an action. That legal duty is then breached by the defendant because they have failed to do that action. The failure of that action would therefore have caused harm. If we go back to the case here of Gibbons and Proctor, the case of Gibbons and Proctor was an example of the defendants who had a legal duty to perform an action. The legal duty was to protect their child and to do so in a way that would mean that they would not die. They intentionally failed to do this with the view to either kill or to commit serious bodily harm, grievous bodily harm, and by failing to do so their failure, their failure to act caused the harm in question. It caused the starvation of the child. That therefore means that they were liable in the case of criminal law for their actions. The case of Stone and Dobson is very similar to that of Gibbons and Proctor. The case of Stone and Dobson involved again two defendants. The first defendant was the sister of the victim. The second defendant was the partner of the first defendant. The victim in question had been anorexic and so therefore refused to eat. Now the reason why liability existed here and why a duty of care existed here was because the duty of care existed on the part of D1 and D2 because of two reasons. They had firstly voluntarily taken up the job of caring for the victim and secondly the victim was living in their house. So these are two reasons why a duty of care existed and their failure to uphold their duty of care led to the victim dying. The result was the pair were both convicted of manslaughter. The case of Miller is a case which highlights the fact that liability may arise in circumstances where the defendant actually creates the danger in the first place and then as a result of creating the danger they fail to act to try and to try and put the danger out so to speak. The defendant in this case was a squatter who had smoked a cigarette and then fell asleep. Unbeknownst to them they had failed to actually put the cigarette out at the point at which they fell asleep. Upon waking up they had noticed that the fire had been lit as a result of his smoking of the cigarette. He then did not take any precautions nor did he do anything to try and put the fire out. He simply got up and left leaving a fire to to get out of hand. Now the House of Lords held that there was a legal duty to act and that this legal duty has been instigated at the point when the defendant woke up and realised there was a fire. The defendant was therefore under a duty of care to act in such a way as to try and prevent or at least extinguish the fire. Now this doesn't mean that they were under a duty of care and there was a requirement that they put the fire out. It might have been the case that the fire was too out of control to do so but they should have shown at least some kind of inclination that they were going to act in a way which would have tried to prevent the fire from happening. They didn't do that at all. The case of Airedale National Health Service versus Bland was a case which involved a certain Mr Bland who had been seriously injured as a result of being involved in the Hillsborough disaster. The Hillsborough disaster is an event that takes place in a football stadium in the Hillsborough stadium whereby a number of individuals get crushed owing to the increased capacity of people being put into the football stadium and the fact that there was nowhere for those people to go. A number of people died and a number of cases were brought against a number of different people for various different parts of their involvement in the disaster itself. Now Mr Bland had been in a persistent vegetative state since the accident and the doctors looking after him believed that the right course of action for this Mr Bland and the best interests for him would be to remove his life support and let him die. Now it was argued by the solicitor of Mr Bland that to do so would actually be murder by omission and that they would be breaching their doctor's duty of care in doing so. When the case reached the House of Lords the appeal was dismissed. It was held that the removal of life support and the withdrawal of further care would be an omission but it would be a lawful omission under the general rules that doctors have a certain amount of discretion to act in the and so Lord Gough argued that by simply omitting to provide further care in this circumstance they were acting in the best interest of the patient under their own medical expert testimony and their own medical advice and so the doctors were acting lawfully. The final case I want to talk about in relation to omissions is the case from 2020 of Crown versus Broughton. Now R.M Broughton is a case involving a certain Mr Broughton who was the defendant who was a rapper who had supplied his girlfriend with some class-a drugs while they were both at a music festival. In addition to the supplying of the drugs the defendant had claimed to multiple individuals that he had quote altered the drugs to potentially increase their effects. He had he had boosted them in some kind of way. Now we don't actually know what he had done to the drugs but we just know that is what he had claimed has happened. When the victim then took an adverse reaction to the drugs the defendant didn't alert the relevant authorities nor did he call for help immediately. Instead he decided to film the victim then spoke to her parents on the phone telling them what had happened where the parents then pleaded with the defendant to get some kind of medical help for the victim. The victim then died as a result of the taking of the adverse taking an adverse reaction to these class-a drugs. Now according to expert medical testimony at the time it was suggested that if the defendant had gotten help for the victim at an earlier point in time there may have been up to a 90 percent chance that the victim would have survived. Fundamentally speaking in less of a lawyer speak just speaking generally if the defendant had taken the appropriate precautions at the time it was very likely that the victim would have lived and so the result was that they died. The defendant was therefore convicted of gross negligence manslaughter for his failure to act given the circumstances in question. So these are all cases which illustrate the fact that failure to act is something that can be done that can be done which can therefore lead to criminal liability. The use of an omission can lead to criminal liability. But the final thing that we want to talk about in relation to the actus reus in offence is this idea of causation. Now again just like with the idea of an omission depending on whether or not you are depending on what law school you're at and will depend on whether or not you do tort first or whether you do crime first whether you do them both at the same time you will you will cover omission causation sorry in the law of tort as well in quite a lot of detail and so there's a lot of crossover that you need to think about there. Now causation is a principle in the criminal law which only applies to the type of crime which is A result crime is a crime which a particular end result is has to occur from the criminal conduct. So for example murder is a result crime because it requires the result of the death of a of a victim. So that's why it is a result crime the results is very important and is actually instrumental to the to the finding of criminal liability. We then have to make a delineation between two different kinds of causation. First we have to think about causation in fact and then second we have to think about causation in law. We're going to cover causation in fact here again this is just an experimental video that I'm just doing for revision purposes but if people enjoy this kind of content feel free to let me know in the comments down below and I'll and I will do more of these for all of these different topics and if you have any questions or considerations or any points of improvement that you wish to see in these kinds of videos if you want to see them in the future then let me know maybe having more detail on the screen might be an important point for you or maybe splitting these topics up even further into into individual sessions I don't know but if you feel like these are may be helpful then let me know. Now the idea of causation in fact which is what we're just going to finish on here is this idea that we determine what were the factual circumstances in which the end result took place. Now causation in fact is determined by something known as the but-for test. The but-for test essentially invites us to ask the question but for the conduct of the defendant would the result have happened? So if the defendant's actions didn't happen would the result still have taken place? So let's think about this as a in the case of case of murder let's say an individual dies as a result of some action if we were to conclude that it was only the action of the defendant that causes the death of the victim then we would say that this satisfies the but-for test. It means that there would have been no death as the if there was no action on the part of the defendant the result would be that they would be liable there would have been causation there but if you say hang on if the defendant didn't do this thing this person would still have died anyway well then that means that the defendant was not the cause of the result and therefore they would not be liable for their actions. Two cases illustrate this point one case where there was causation in fact one case where there was not we're going to begin with the case where there was not causation in fact this is the case of R and White from 1910. In this case the defendant wanted to murder his mother he had quite a significant amount of mens rea in relation to the murder of his mother he attempted to do so by putting cyanide in her drink his mother drank some of the drink and then she died now you might therefore think that he was he was therefore a murderer and could be convicted of murder well it turned out that she had died quite ironically in fact quite coincidentally from a completely unrelated instance of heart failure in fact medical evidence showed that the cyanide was not the cause of the death okay it was not the cyanide that causes the death to the mother it was this completely unrelated instance of heart failure the result was if we asked the question of the book for test we can get an interesting conclusion but for the conduct of the defendant would the result have happened so but for the putting of the cyanide in her drink would the result have happened well the answer to that question is yes because it was irrelevant whether he put cyanide in her drink she would have died anyway because she died of a completely unrelated instance of heart failure so as a result of which he could not be convicted of murder he could only have been convicted of attempted murder the case of wallace finally therefore is a case that illustrates the extent to which the uh the idea of causation can can go and it also touches a little bit on causation in law as well so in this case the defendant was the ex-girlfriend of the victim they had broken up and the ex-boyfriend then formed a different relationship with another at which point the defendant decided to attack the victim with acid she would throw acid onto the victim leaving him permanently disfigured completely paralyzed i believe he was um paraplegic as a result of this and a in a state of physical and psychological distress as you can imagine the acid attack was in fact so damaging that it led the victim to make the decision to travel to belgium where assisted suicide is legal to take his own life to euthanize himself now according to the legal counsel of the um of the of the defendant sorry the doctor's injection in belgium which legally euthanized the victim actually constituted a new intervening cause something known as a novus actus interveniens such that it cannot be said that the defendant was the sole cause of the action and so therefore could not be convicted of murder this is something that was rejected by the court of appeal and it was held that they could be considered the cause of the death because the the only reason why there was a doctor's injection in the first place was because of the actions of the defendant in throwing the acid over the victim so but for the actions of the defendant in throwing the act in throwing the acid would the doctor's injection have legally euthanized the victim or they wouldn't have made the decision to go to belgium to make this decision to legally euthanize themselves so all of this represents a basic overview a basic revision of the concept of actus reus within the criminal law like i said if you enjoyed these videos do let me know this is a like i said a bit of a test video on whether or not this is actually useful for people or whether or not it could be potentially useful for people if you feel like it could be potentially useful for you let me know let me know what changes might need to be made to make it even more useful and then i will start to put together some more revision videos if that is the case that people