The relationship between crime and (a) capacity (b) intention and (c) an act justified by law.
Introduction
Crime can be defined as the intentional violation of the criminal law, committed without defence or excuse and personalised by the state. This means that intention and violation are prerequisites of crime. There can therefore be no crime without law. There is also no crime where the act is justified by the law. The elements of crime are a voluntary act or omission (actus reus), accompanied by a certain state of mind (mens rea). Mens rea is a legal phrase used to describe the mental state a person should be in while committing a crime for it to be intentional. It can refer to a general intent to break the law or a specific, premeditated plan to commit a particular offense. To convict an accused person of a wrong doing, a criminal prosecutor must show beyond any reasonable doubt that the suspect actively and knowingly participated in a crime that harmed another person or their property. An act may be any kind of voluntary human behaviour. Capacity is being able to understand the facts and significance of one’s behaviour and their ability to reason, while intention is an anticipated outcome that is intended or that guides your planned actions. In order for a crime to be said to have been committed the offender must have intended to commit the crime with the knowledge that it is against the law. There cannot be crime without law. If an act is prohibited, a legally authoritative body must have written it out in advance what behaviour is banned (Jensen, 2016).
Criminal intent is a necessary component of a crime that involves a conscious decision on one party to injure or deprive another. It is one of three categories of mens rea, it is the basis for the establishment of guilt in a criminal case. There are a number of kinds of criminal intent that may be applied in situations ranging from premeditation to spontaneous action. It is therefore possible to find criminal intent even when a crime is not premeditated. Individuals who commit a crime spontaneously may still understand that their actions will cause harm to another party and break existing criminal law. It is to say that an individual that takes action with the knowledge that such behaviour will lead to the commission of a crime can be said to possess criminal intent. This means that while a person may have committed a criminal act, they can only be found guilty of criminal activity if the deed was deliberate. Mens rea determines whether someone committed a criminal deed purposefully or accidentally. This commonly applies to murder cases. The perpetrator’s mens rea, or mental state at the time of the killing, is an essential factor in whether they will be declared guilty or innocent. In order to receive a conviction, the lawyer must prove that the accused party had some intention or willingness to end the life of another person. However, if evidence prooves the death to be accidental and unavoidable, the suspect must be declared innocent and set free. Intention is of two types, direct intent and oblique intent. Direct intent is relatively straightforward and it is linked to the defendant’s aim or purpose. Oblique intent is where the defendant did not desire the consequences, but they knew they were certain to occur (Williams, 1987).
“When a person is planning to achieve, a given consequence, there may be several intermediate steps that have to be taken before the full result as desired is achieved. It is not open to the accused to pick and choose which of these steps are or are not intended. The accused is taken to intend to accomplish all outcomes necessary to the overall plan. For example, if A wishes to claim on B's life insurance policy, and so shoots at B who is sitting in a bus, the bullet may have to pass through a window. Thus, even though A may not have desired B's death, it was an inevitable precondition to a claim. Similarly, he may never consciously have considered the damage to the window, but both the murder and the damage under the Criminal Damage Act 1971 are intended. This is distinguishing between the direct intent, which is the main aim of the plan and the oblique intent, which covers all intermediate steps. More generally, someone directly intends a consequence when their purpose or aim is to cause it, even though they believe the likelihood of success is remote. In R v Dadson, for example, the defendant shot at a man he wrongly believed was out of range. In R v Mohan, the court held that direct intent means, "aim or purpose" "a decision to bring about, insofar as it lies within the accused's power, the commission of the offence. No matter whether the accused desired that consequence of his act or not." (Intention, 2016).
If one acts in a manner that goes against the law, then that particular person would have committed a crime, but however, if the act is justified by law then there would be no crime. In civil proceedings and criminal prosecutions under the common law, a defendant may raise a defence in an attempt to avoid criminal or civil liability and this is known as legal defence.“
Legal defences' falls into two categories, excuse defences and justification defences. Excuse defence is when the defendant admits to committing a criminal act but believes that he or she cannot be held responsible because there was no criminal intent. Excuse defences that are used in courts today are; Age, Mental Disorder, Automatism, Mistake of Fact and Mistake of Law. Justification defences involves a defendant admitting that when they committed a criminal act, their actions were justified by; duress, necessity, self-defence, provocation, and entrapment. The automatism (an excuse defence), which is a claim that physiological or environmental factors caused the defendant to commit criminal actions involuntarily, without criminal intent. While most criminal defences attempt to excuse or justify the defendant's criminal guilt by addressing mens rea, the automatism defence is different in that it attempts to prove that the defendant did not actually commit actus Reus. If the defendant is found to have been acting as an automaton when the crime was committed, that is, totally unconsciously and involuntarily, then he cannot be said to have been "acting" at all, in a legal sense. Without actus reus, the defendant cannot be held criminally liable for his actions. Unconsciousness and involuntary action might be caused by a great many factors, including heavy intoxication, sleep, hypnosis and the like. However, automatism in the sense of a valid legal defence cannot usually hold if the unconscious, involuntary state was the result of voluntary actions. Automatism doesn't necessarily mean that the accused has to be unconscious; it means that the consciousness must be so impaired that the accused lacks voluntary control, sleepwalking or taking medication without knowing the effects are examples of automatism.” (Goff, 2008, p. 48).
Mistake of fact may sometimes be used as a defence to lessen or eliminate the element of mens rea in a crime. Unlike mistake of law, in which the defendant does not realize she is committing a crime because she's unaware of the law that criminalizes the action, a mistake of fact involves genuine ignorance of one or more material factors involved in the crime itself. In situations when a mistake of fact cannot eliminate mens rea, it can sometimes reduce it. In the inappropriate use of deadly force, for example, if the defendant takes a life while honestly and reasonably mistakenly believing that his own life was in danger, then a mistake of fact could be argued in court to reduce the charge from murder to a lesser homicide such as manslaughter. Mistake of law is when everyone is presumed to know the criminal law, except for minors, and the general rule that "ignorance of the law is no excuse" which is found in s.19 of the Criminal Code (Goff, 2008, p. 49).
Mental disorder is defined as a disease of the mind. By disease of the mind it is to mean any illness, disorder, or abnormal condition that changes or deviates one’s mental capacity and functioning. This can be done by substance use such as alcohol, drugs, hysteria or even concussion at times. Examples include schizophrenia among others. The state of mind of people with such disorders may indulge them in activities they are fully or not even aware of therefore they cannot be held responsible they commit an act of crime. A mistake of fact is a material error in the facts or circumstances surrounding a contract. It may not had been made intentionally. The mistake of fact can make the contract void and can allow parties to escape liability. When both parties make the mistake of fact, the contract will typically be cancelled by the court. However, when there is just one party who makes a mistake, this determination fluctuates, and the decision is made by the court. An example is when a house seller sales the to a party with the belief that all property in it is his, however after deeper analysis it is realised the seller doesn’t actually own the other property, the seller may be exempted on the basis of mistake of fact (Williams, 1987).
Unlawful pressure exerted upon a person to coerce that person to perform an act that he or she ordinarily would not perform is called duress. There are two defences of duress: compulsion and the common-law defence. Duress justification defence is when an individual does not have a free will anymore, this maybe because of the wrongful threat of death or bodily harm, of one person, which makes another person commit a crime they would not have committed. The accused person who chooses to use the duress defence would have to prove: The accused committed the offence because they believed that the threats of death would be carried out, the threats should have been delivered by a person who was present at the time the accused committed an offence and the accused should be not a member of the group planning to commit the offence. Another justification defence is entrapment. Examples are drug sales and possession or prostitution. When prosecution results from law enforcement involvement defendants can claim to have been entrapped, that is, they would not have committed the crime without law enforcement's participation (Jensen, 2016).
Provocation is an action or speech that makes someone angry, especially deliberately that deprives an ordinary person of self-control. To prove provocation a wrongful act or insult should have occurred, the act or insult should be sufficient to deprive an ordinary person of self-control, the person should have responded suddenly and the person responded before there was time for passion to cool. It is similar to entrapment. Self-defence involves defending yourself, your property or defending someone else, which justifies the use of force against a person. There is a limit to the amount of force accepted as self-defence. However, in cases where too much force and brutality were use one can be charged with criminal intent. Therefore, everyone who is unlawfully assaulted and causes death or bodily harm in repelling the assault is justified as (a) he causes it under reasonable apprehension of death or bodily harm from the violence (b) believes, on reasonable grounds, that they cannot otherwise preserve himself from death or bodily harm. An individual, who causes these harms or kills someone while defending themselves, must have these three elements to prove it was self-defence: There was an unlawful assault, a reasonable fear of death or serious bodily harm and that there was no way of surviving (Williams, 1987).
References
Intention (criminal law). (2016). En.wikipedia.org. Retrieved 18 October 2016, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intention_(criminal_law)
Goff, J.P., Horst, R.L., Mueller, F.J., Miller, J.K., Kiess, G.A., Dowlen, H.H. Criminal law and intent. J. Dairy Sci. 1991;74:3863–3871.
Jensen, K. (2016). General Intent Crimes vs. Specific Intent Crimes | Nolo.com.Nolo.com. Retrieved 24 October 2016, from http://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/general-vs-specific-intent.html
Williams, Glanville. Oblique Intention, (1987) Cambridge Law Journal 417
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