Mens Rea Case Study

To whom it may concern,

For most of the crimes we must consider two elements of crime which are the Mens rea and the Actus reus. To establish criminal behaviour, the Actus reus and the Mens rea must occur at the same time. To explain this further an example of this is, imagine that person A shoots person B, where person A is intending to kill person B but completely misses. However, later person A accidentally runs over person B, where person B’s life is taken away. Person A is not found guilty of person B’s death.

Moving on now to Mens Rea, in Mens rea there are two main stages which are intention and recklessness. In Mens rea the aim must be that there is the highest degree of fault in all levels. An individual, who plans to commit a crime

Overall, being reckless simply means that you’re taking an unjustified risk. The ultimate question of whether a subjective test or objective test should be entitled has increased the difficulty of recklessness in criminal law. In the context of criminal damage there is a leading case that was used for this specific area which is R v Cunningham (1957). In this case a subjective test was used to determine the recklessness. What happened in this case is that the appellant ripped a gas meter from the wall in order to gain access to the money in the meter. Following his actions, he caused gas to escape. The gas then managed to seep into cracks in the wall and into the neighbouring house where his future mother-in-law was sleeping and the eventually got poisoned by the gas. The defendant was charged under section 23 of the Offences against the Person act 1861 which provides ‘Whosoever shall unlawfully and maliciously administer to or cause to be administered to or taken by any other person any poison or other destructive or noxious thing, so as thereby to endanger the life of such person, or so as thereby to inflict upon such person any grievous bodily harm, shall be guilty of