Facts: The appellant consumed some home made wine. This had a much greater effect on him than anticipated. He committed sexual assaults and claimed he was so drunk he did not know what he was doing. He argued that he had not voluntarily placed himself in that condition as the wine was much stronger than he realised.

Held: The intoxication was still voluntary even though he had not realised the strength of it. The crime of sexual assault is one of basic intent and therefore the appellant was unable to rely on his intoxicated state to negative the mens rea.

Facts: The defendant (D) bore a grudge against his employer. One night, he set fire to the residential hotel where he had been employed. According to his evidence he was so drunk at the time that it did not occur to him that there might be people there whose lives might be endangered.

Held: For D to be guilty of criminal damage there need not be any subjective appreciation of the risk (i.e. he does not need to foresee the risk of harm resulting from his actions). The risk need only be obvious in the sense that it would have been obvious to the reasonable man (i.e. it need only be objectively reckless).

⇒ Note: this test of recklessness no longer applies following the case of R v G and R.

Facts: The defendant was a martial arts expert who was demonstrating his skill to friends by performing a move which he anticipated would bring his foot within inches of a shop window. He had miscalculated the risk, and he broke the window.

Held: The argument that he was not reckless because he had given thought to the risk but mistakenly believed that he had minimised it, was rejected by the Divisional Court because he knew there was some risk. The defendant was found guilty of causing criminal damage.

Facts: The defendant (D) was the driver of a lorry. A piece of machinery weighing between three and five tons was loaded onto the trailer of D's lorry. D had been advised to secure the machine with chains, but did not. The machine fell off and killed a pedestrian.

Held: D was driving with the knowledge that by doing so he was putting other road users at risk of serious injury or death. In the circumstances D was driving recklessly.

Facts: The defendant (D) repeatedly hit the victim with a chair in a pub. The victim died as a result. The defendant did not intent to kill the victim.

Held: D was guilty of murder. The mens rea of murder can be satisfied either by an intent to cause death or an intent to cause grievous bodily harm.

Facts: The appellant ripped a gas meter from the wall in order to steal the money in the meter. This caused gas to escape. The gas seeped through small cracks in the wall to the neighbouring property where his future mother-in-law was sleeping and was poisoned by the gas. The defendant (D) was charged under s23 of the Offences Against the Person Act 1861 with "maliciously administering a noxious thing so as to endanger life". D appealed to the Court of Appeal.

Held: The Court of Appeal, allowing D’s appeal, held that for a D to have acted "maliciously" there had to be proof that he intended to cause the harm in question or had been reckless as to whether such harm would be caused. In this context, recklessness involved the defendant in being aware of the risk that his actions might cause the prohibited consequence. In other words, recklessness was subjective.

Facts: The appellant had taken a substantial quantity of drugs over a 48 hour period. He then went to a pub and had a drink. He got into a fight with two others. The landlord went to break up the fight and the appellant attacked him. When the police arrived, he assaulted the arresting officer. Another officer was struck by the appellant when he was being driven to the police station. The next morning he attacked a police inspector in his cell. He was charged with four counts of occasioning actual bodily harm and three counts of assaulting a police constable in the execution of his duty. The appellant claimed he had no recollection of the events due to his intoxication. He was found guilty on all counts and appealed contending that he could not be convicted when he lacked the mens rea of the offences due to his intoxicated state.

Held: Appeal dismissed. Conviction upheld. The crime was one of basic intent and therefore his intoxication could not be relied on as a defence.

Facts: The defendant (D), an educationally subnormal 14-year-old schoolgirl, had entered a neighbour's garden shed, poured white spirit on the floor and ignited it. D then fled as the shed burst into flames.

Held: Caldwell recklessness (see case here) fell into disrepute because it punished defendants for failing to notice a risk which would have been obvious to a reasonable person. Here, the test was whether a reasonable person would have realised that the lighting of the spirit would create a risk of damage to the shed, not whether the risk was obvious to D or obvious to a reasonable person of D’s age and mental ability. As she had failed to consider the risk and it would have been obvious to a reasonable person, she was guilty of criminal damage. This case was heavily criticised and was an influencing factor in abolishing Caldwell recklessness in the case of R v G and R.

Facts: Two boys, aged 11 and 12, went camping without their parents approval. The boys found some old newspapers outside the Co-op which they lit with a lighter and then threw them under a wheelie bin. They then left without putting them out assuming they would naturally burn out. In fact the burning newspapers set light to the wheelie bin and the fire spread to the Co-op shop and caused over £1m of damage. They were originally convicted of criminal damage on the basis that it would have been obvious to a reasonable person that what they were doing was posing a risk to property.

Held: At the House of Lords, their convictions were quashed; as a result, the court overturned R v Caldwell, which had established objective recklessness in cases of criminal damage.

This case, then, confirms that fro criminal damage Caldwell recklessness should not be used and instead a defendant will be reckless if he or she realised that there is a risk of the harm arising and decides to take that risk, when to do so is unreasonable.

Facts: The defendant set light to a wardrobe after consuming some out of date valium tablets which had been prescribed to his partner. He took the valium tablets as he was feeling stressed as his partner had asked him to leave their home. The defendant was convicted of causing criminal damage being reckless as to whether life would be endangered, following the trial judge's direction to the jury that voluntary intoxication cannot be a defence to a basic intent crime. The defendant appealed.

Held: The conviction was quashed on appeal on the grounds that he could not be expected to anticipate that tranquillisers would have that effect upon him. He was told that the tablets would calm his nerves and do him no harm: as he became intoxicated he was held to have been involuntarily intoxicated.

Facts: The police were called to the appellant’s house where he was heavily intoxicated and in a depressive state and had been self harming. The police took him to hospital. He was making a disturbance in the waiting room so the officers took him outside. The appellant then took out his penis and started rubbing it against the officer's thigh. He was charged with sexual assault contrary to S.3 of the Sexual Offences Act 2003. He did not dispute that the offence occurred but claimed to have no recollection of the events due to his intoxication. The judge ruled that the offence was one of basic intent and such his intoxication could not be relied on in his defence. He was convicted and appealed on the grounds that the judge was in error in ruling that sexual assault was a crime of basic intent since it requires an intention to touch.

Held: Appeal dismissed. The appellant's conviction was upheld. Parliament in passing the Sexual Offences Act 2003 can not be taken to have changed the previous law which denied a defendant from relying on voluntary intoxication as a defence.

See the full case here.

Facts: The defendant got into a fight in a pub with another man. He took off his belt and hit the man with the belt. The belt ricocheted off and hit a woman in the face.

Held: The defendant was liable for the injuries inflicted on the woman despite the fact that he did not intend to harm her. The mens rea he had to cause harm to the man was transferred to the woman.

Facts: The defendant threw some stones into a crowd of people. He wanted to disperse the crowd. A stone hit and smashed a window. He was convicted of criminal damage and appealed.

Held: CONTConviction quashed. His mens rea for an offence against the person could not be transferred to a property offence as they are entirely different offences.ENT

Facts: The defendant was homeless and schizophrenic. He found refuge in a haystack where he made a hollow and tried to go to sleep. He was cold so he lit a fire inside the hollow to keep himself warm. Inevitably the whole haystack caught fire and he ran off and was picked up by the police. The defendant contended that he never thought of the possibility of a the whole stack catching fire. At his trial a consultant psychiatrist gave evidence that he had a long history of schizophrenia and this would mean that the defendant was quite capable of lighting a fire in a haystack without ever thinking of the danger involved.

Held: At first instance the defendant was convicted, but at the court of appeal the defendant's conviction was quashed. The test should be entirely subjective; if the defendant did not foresee a risk of damage he should not be liable.

Facts: The four appellants were convicted of murder. They had planned to kill a man and then make it look like an accident. They took him to a hut and beat him over the head. Believing that he was dead, they then took his body to a cliff and threw it off. Medical evidence showed that the deceased died from exposure of being left at the bottom of the cliff and not from the blow to the head. They appealed against their convictions on the grounds that the actus reus and mens rea of the crime did not coincide. That is to say when they formed the intention to kill, there was no actus reus as the man was still alive. When they threw him off the cliff, there was no mens rea as they can intend to kill someone they believed was already dead.

Held: Convictions upheld. The act of beating him and throwing him off the cliff was one continuing act.

Facts: The defendant (D) threw his 3 month old baby son on to a hard surface. The baby suffered a fractured skull and died. He stated he had not intended to kill the child, nor did he think his actions would actually kill the child. The trial judge directed the jury, applying R v Nedrick [1986], that D could be said to have intended the death of the child if there was a “substantial risk” the child would suffer serious harm. As a result, they convicted D of murder. D appealed unsuccessfully to the Court of Appeal. He then appealed to the House of Lords.

Held: At the House of Lords, the murder conviction was substituted with a manslaughter conviction. There was a material misdirection by the judge which expanded the mens rea of murder and therefore the murder conviction was unsafe; in other words, requiring “substantial risk” the child would suffer serious harm instead of “virtual certainty” blurred the line between intention and recklessness, which would result in injustice (i.e. people being convicted of murder too often, as it would make it too easy to prove someone intended the consequences of their actions).

⇒ The House of Lords substantially agreed with the Nedrick guidelines with a minor modification. The appropriate direction is: “Where the charge is murder and in the rare cases where the simple direction is not enough, the jury should be directed that they are not entitled to infer the necessary intention, unless they feel sure that death or serious bodily harm was a virtual certainty (barring some unforeseen intervention) as a result of the defendant's actions and that the defendant appreciated that such was the case. The decision is one for the jury to be reached upon a consideration of all the evidence."

See the full case here.