Assignment One: CRIME LEVEL 3

Assignment One: CRIME LEVEL 3

Assignment One: CRIME LEVEL 3

Before considering the purposes of civil and criminal sanctions, it is desirable first to consider briefly the general principles of criminal liability. The most important common law maxim of criminal law is actus non facit reum nisi mens sit rea (the doing of an act does not make a person guilty unless he has a guilty mind). This embodies the common law principle that a person should not be found guilty of a crime unless it can be proved that, in addition to doing a prohibited act (actus reus), he also intended to do it, that is, he had mens rea. (CLARKSON, C & KEATING, H, 2007 Pp. 122-123.

Since one of the most important reasons for imposing criminal sanctions is to deter, it would generally be pointless to punish a person for doing something which he had not intended to do, or possibly for something which he did not even know he had done. Actus reus presents little difficulty, as it is contained in the definition of every crime and it is for the prosecution to prove that the accused did the prohibited act. For example, in the case of murder, if A is charged with murdering B, the prosecution must show, inter alia, that A did in fact kill B. sometimes an omission, rather than an act, may constitute the actus reus of a crime. For example, in Fagan v. Metropolitan Police Commissioner (1968), a constable asked the defendant driver to draw into the kerb, and the defendant did so but stopped with one wheel of his car resting on the constable's foot. He was slow in restarting the engine and moving off when asked to do so and it was held that his omission to move the car immediately amounted to an assault. (This ruling was based on the assumption that the defendant did not deliberately drive on to the constable's foot, which would have been an example of an act creating an assault). However there is the problem of whether volition is an active state in the mind or whether it is a mental state, like a thought , that just comes to one. Moore puts it as "Volitions are simply the last executors both of our more general intentions and of the background states of desire and belief that those more general intentions themselves execute.

This does not consider the connections between the object of the volitions and the mind. Moore also points out the various ways of looking at these connections and intent. The arguments against the existence of volitions is strong and the question as to whether they exist or not is not answered. The Actus Reus requirement of the Criminal Law is a complex act, and the border with the Mens Rea and Actus Reus is blurred because it is difficult to see where in fact the border is, due to the intimate and necessary connection between them ...