Thursday, November 28, 2013

Culpable recklessness and innocent negligence: inferences from conduct

›
How does a court decide what a defendant foresaw about the consequences of his acts? The difference between foreseeing and not foreseeing...
Monday, November 18, 2013

Looking into oral argument about causation

›
Oral argument on appeals is quite an interesting thing, as you can hear and read in relation to Burrage v United States (Docket No 12-751...
Sunday, November 17, 2013

A diligent and simple people

›
Two recent cases from the Supreme Court of Canada: Diligence and freshness In R v Hay , 2013 SCC 61 (8 November 2013) on the issue of ...
Friday, November 15, 2013

Perverse acquittals

›
A conviction can only be "according to law", but an acquittal need not be. We don't often mention the jury's power to r...
Friday, November 01, 2013

For the notebook ...

›
One never knows when the following recent decisions of the High Court of Australia and of the Supreme Court of Canada may be useful: Judges ...
Friday, October 18, 2013

Oyez!

›
Of peripheral interest to criminal lawyers are a couple of recent decisions of the United Kingdom Supreme Court. Prisoners and voting rig...
Thursday, October 10, 2013

Unnecessarily attacking the fundamentals

›
Even the most robust of the fundamentals of the criminal law can be modified by statute. When that happens, the fundamental should retain it...
Tuesday, October 08, 2013

Fresh evidence

›
Fresh evidence was a central topic in two decisions delivered within hours on opposite sides of the planet yesterday. In refusing leave to a...
Thursday, October 03, 2013

Reasonable grounds to suspect

›
Now that we have search on "reasonable grounds to suspect" the commission of an offence, a lesser threshold than the reasonable ...

Ethnicity, deprivation, and manifest inadequacy of sentence

›
In the absence of legislation requiring special consideration at sentencing for the ethnicity of the offender, the relevance of social depri...
Monday, September 23, 2013

Compulsion and willingness

›
I should add some comments to the summary of Akulue v R posted here on 19 September 2013. Affirmative defences Akulue concerns an affirma...
Thursday, September 19, 2013

Must you? The statutory defence of compulsion.

›
The defence of compulsion may be thought of as a subset of the defence of necessity. The former is, in New Zealand, a statutory , and the la...
Sunday, August 25, 2013

Now we are nine

›
 If you are wondering (and I know you aren't) how to observe this, the beginning of the tenth year of this site, you could: Study the pr...
Monday, August 19, 2013

Eyewitness identification warnings

›
Getting judges to obey the law on eyewitness identification A rigorous application of statutory requirements for identification warnings is ...
Friday, August 09, 2013

Statutory interpretation, causation and responsibility for accidental death

›
Causation is the critical consideration in Hughes v R [ 2013] UKSC 56 (31 July 2013). The offences under analysis, punishable by imprisonm...