Criminal Law and Practice
This subject combines substantive criminal law (the elements of specific offences and defences) with the procedure of a criminal case: charge, bail, disclosure, and the route to trial.
Fault element (mens rea) questions are the most common trap: two very similar fact patterns can produce different offences depending only on the defendant’s state of mind.
- Actus reus and mens rea of core offences against the person and property
- General defences
- Police powers, charge and bail
- Criminal procedure from the magistrates’ court to trial
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Written for this page only, in the same single best answer format as the 370+ questions in the Criminal Law and Practice section of the course.
A defendant sets fire to a house to destroy insured contents, believing everyone inside has already left. In fact a resident is still asleep upstairs and dies in the fire. At trial, the defendant genuinely believed the house was empty, though a reasonable person in his position would have realised there was a high probability someone remained. Can the jury find that the defendant intended to kill?
The jury may find intention only where death or serious injury was a virtually certain result of the defendant’s act and the defendant himself appreciated that it was virtually certain, not merely where an objective, reasonable person would have foreseen a risk. Since the defendant genuinely believed the house was empty, the necessary subjective foresight is missing, so intention cannot be found on this route. Foresight of a high probability, short of virtual certainty, is not treated as legally equivalent to intention, and while motive is indeed irrelevant to whether intention exists, that principle does not itself supply the missing foresight.
Authority: R v Woollin [1999] 1 AC 82.
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