Mens rea

• R v Woollin:

  -The defendant lost his temper and threw his three-month-old-son on to a hard surface. His son sustained a fractured skull and died. Woollin was charged with murder. He denied that he had an intention to cause serious harm.

  -A jury were required to determine whether the defendant had intended to kill or do serious bodily harm.

  -Where that simple direction was not enough, the jury should be further directed that they were not entitled to infer the necessary intention unless they felt sure that death or serious bodily harm was a virtually certain result of the defendant’s action.
• -Intention will be transferred from Defendants intended victim to defendants actual victim.

  -R v Latimer
• R v Cunningham

  -Defendant went into the cellar of a house and ripped the gas meter of the wall so that he could steal the money from it.

  -In doing so, gas escaped and seeped into the house next door where a woman was asleep. She inhaled a lot of gas and became seriously ill so that her life was endangered.

  -Defendant was charged under s23 Offences Against the Person Act 1861 (maliciously administrating a noxious thing so as to endanger life).
• R v Thabo Meli-The Ds took their victim to a hut and struck him over the head intending to kill him.-They then rolled his body over the edge of a cliff so that his death would look like an accident.

  -In fact, the victim was not killed in the hut, nor did he die rolling off the cliff. Medical evidence showed that he actually died of exposure.-The Ds were convicted of murder and appealed claiming that when they committed the actus reus of murder (the actual killing) they had no mens rea, and when they had mens rea (in the shed) they did not commit the actus reus.
• Fagan v MPC

  The defendant accidentally drove his car on to a policeman's foot and when he realised, he refused to remove it immediately.

  It was held that the actus reus of the assault was a continuing act which, while started without mens rea, was still in progress at the time the mens rea was formed and so there was a coincidence of actus reus and mens rea sufficient to found criminal liability.