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Question of the week

Manslaughter

Criminal Liability · SQE1-style single best answer

At a family gathering a man is told by his brother-in-law, in front of everyone, that his late father had been a thief and a coward. He loses his self-control and beats the brother-in-law to death. At his murder trial he says that in the community in which he was raised an insult of that kind to a dead parent is the gravest humiliation there is, and that any man from that community would have done as he did.

How should his cultural background be treated under the third requirement of loss of control?

  1. Option A. Incorrect answer. It must be attributed to the comparator, so that the jury asks how a man from that community would have reacted.
  2. Option B. Incorrect answer. It must be left out altogether, because the comparator is a person of the defendant's sex and age and nothing more.
  3. Option C. Correct answer. It goes to the gravity of the insult, but cannot lower the degree of self-restraint expected of him.Correct
  4. Option D. Incorrect answer. It is relevant only if it amounts to a recognised medical condition affecting his capacity for self-restraint.
  5. Option E. Incorrect answer. It is irrelevant, because the third requirement applies an objective standard that excludes even his sex and age.

Why

The correct answer is C. Section 54(1)(c) Coroners and Justice Act 2009 asks whether a person of the defendant's sex and age, with a normal degree of tolerance and self-restraint and in the defendant's circumstances, might have reacted in the same or a similar way. Section 54(3) defines those circumstances as all of the defendant's circumstances other than any whose only relevance is that they bear on his general capacity for tolerance or self-restraint. His upbringing is therefore admissible to show how grave the insult was to a person in his position, but it cannot be deployed to argue that less self-restraint should be expected of him than of anyone else (R v Rejmanski, applying the division drawn under the old law in Attorney General for Jersey v Holley).

A is incorrect because building the community's expected reaction into the comparator would displace the uniform standard of tolerance and self-restraint that s.54(1)(c) sets. B is incorrect because it goes too far: the defendant's circumstances are expressly part of the test under s.54(3), and they include matters going to the gravity of the trigger. D is incorrect because a recognised medical condition is the gateway to diminished responsibility, not to s.54(3); and even a medical condition is excluded from this limb where its only relevance is to the defendant's general capacity for self-restraint. E is incorrect because sex and age are written into the comparator by s.54(1)(c) itself.

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