Causation

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 549.

Unit 9.

Ex. 107. Look through the text.

For crimes which require a consequence, it must be shown that conduct of the accused caused the consequence to occur. There are two stages to establishing causation - factual and legal causation - and both must be present for a conviction.

The factual causation test asks whether the conduct of the accused was, in fact, a cause of the required consequence. To establish this, it is helpful to use the "but for" test: but for the conduct of the accused, would the consequence have occurred. If the answer is no, then the conduct cannot be said to be a factual cause of the consequence; if the answer is yes, it can.

Clearly there can be more than one factual cause. If, for example, I ask someone to cross a road to fetch my frisbee, and in doing so that person is hit by a careless driver, then I am a cause of the accident. If I had not asked the person to cross the road, the accident would not have happened. The careless driving is also a cause. If the driver had not been driving carelessly, the accident would not have happened.

The legal causation test asks whether there has been a "break in the chain of causation"...has anything intervened between the conduct of the accused and the consequence which, in law, makes the accused be considered not to have caused the consequence? For example, what if, following the accident described above, the injured person is taken to hospital and given grossly inadequate treatment resulting in death? Is the person who wanted his frisbee back still a cause of the death? Clearly, he is still a factual cause of the death. But he may not be a legal cause of death - the subsequent events may have been enough to break the chain of causation. As a general principle, an event will not break the chain of causation if it was reasonably foreseeable that it would occur.