Hancock and Shankland [1986] AC 455
Handler, Mares and Williams (eds), Landmark cases in criminal law (Hart), Forthcoming
University of Cambridge Faculty of Law Research Paper No. 59/2015
19 Pages Posted: 2 Oct 2015 Last revised: 3 Dec 2015
Date Written: October 1, 2015
Abstract
During the miner’s strike of 1984-5, two miners dropped concrete objects onto the path of an incoming convoy bearing a strike-breaking miner. There, on Heads of the Valleys Road, under Rhymney Bridge, events were set in motion to force English law to redefine what it means to intend death on a charge of murder.
English law only sought technical doctrinal precision in its fault, or mens rea, from the middle of the twentieth century. Before then, a person was presumed to intend the natural and probable consequences of his actions, and until 1898, there were significant limits on what evidence the defendant could give about his or her mental state. Thereafter, English law needed a test for juries to use. Normally, a jury would be directed to use its “common sense” understanding of “intention”. However, there were some exceptional situations, where the defendant’s purpose was not death or grievous bodily harm and such situations required a special direction to the jury. This direction had been attempted by the House of Lords prior to Hancock and Shankland, indeed, only a year before, in R v Moloney. That direction in Moloney had asked the jury to look for intention by considering whether the outcome alleged to be intended was a “natural” consequence of the defendant’s acts and if the defendant knew that. If so, the jury might infer intention. Even so, this model direction was too simple, it left too much ambiguity in what constituted “natural” consequences. In Hancock and Shankland, the Court of Appeal had certified as a question of public importance whether this direction required amplification; the House of Lords replied affirmatively, but did not provide a direction containing it. Instead, they wiped clean the earlier encrustations of vocabulary such as “natural” and “probable”, temporarily removing any specific jury direction on intention. The space so created was immediately filled by the Court of Appeal in Nedrick in 1986 through a model direction, confirmed by the House of Lords in Woollin in 1999: the jury may find that the defendant intended the relevant consequence where she or he foresaw it as a virtual certainty and in fact it was a virtual certainty. In short, it was Hankcock and Shankland which made the modern law possible though itself failed to achieve it.
Keywords: Criminal Law, crime, murder, manslaughter, miner's strike
JEL Classification: K14, K41, K42
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation