Quiz Answer Key and Fun Facts
1. Whilst the English law may profess to hold the tenet "innocent until proven guilty", there seem to be a few exceptions. For example, last century, a man was found to be drunk in a hospital. The police removed him from the hospital and took him to a highway. They then declared him to be drunk and charged him of being drunk on a public highway! The man in question was convicted and his appeal was dismissed.
2. This defendant was a man who tried so hard to poison his mother by putting cyanide in his mother's drink. Unfortunately for him (or perhaps fortunately), his mother died of a heart attack before she could drink it. The defendant was found not guilty of murder, but he was guilty of attempted murder. The case is frequently used as an example of the sine qua non, or but for rule which establishes factual causation.
3. Theft - this crazy crim wasn't a crim at all by the values of the civil law. She befriended an elderly neighbour, a Mr John Dolphin, and managed to wheedle £60,000 and a TV out of him over the course of six months. Although he was a simple man, he gave her the money and the TV in good faith, and the transaction was valid in civil law. However, this didn't unduly trouble the House of Lords, who ruled that it didn't matter that the criminal and civil law were entirely at odds and banged her up for theft.
4. This crafty crim managed to get away with his acts. He was a student at Oxford University and, during the weeks prior to his exams, he climbed into a professor's study and "borrowed" the paper for the exam he was to sit. He didn't take the paper away with him, so he was charged with stealing the confidential information on it. However, he was acquitted and even though the prosecution appealed, the acquittal was upheld.
5. Murder - there was once a charming woman who murdered her husband - ooops, sorry, she committed voluntary manslaughter on her husband. The lady in question was a battered wife whose husband threatened to beat her one time too many. After threatening her, he fell asleep on the sofa, whereupon she went into the kitchen, selected and sharpened a kitchen knife, returned to the living room and sloooowly stabbed her husband through the heart. She was convicted of murder first time round (when her counsel pleaded provocation), but her crafty counsel managed to get the case reheard 3 years later, when battered women's syndrome had been officially recognised, and the conviction was commuted to voluntary manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility.
6. Diminished responsibility - this lady was responsible for the recognition of battered women's syndrome as an illness which falls within the meaning of s2 Homicide Act 1957. The facts of the case are that she was abused for years by her violent husband. Much like the case above, he pushed it that wee bit too far and, while he was sleeping, she doused him in petrol and set him on fire ("hell hath no fury like a woman scorned" indeed!). The dastardly husband died some 10 days later, and the lady was convicted but the conviction was quashed on appeal with an order to retrial. On retrial, she was found not guilty of murder by way of diminished responsibility, and was given the alternate verdict of voluntary manslaughter.
7. It's nice to know (specially for us poor law students) that even the best of us make mistakes at times. In this case, Lord Bridge gave the leading judgment, stating that impossibility was no defence to attempting a crime. However, not two years previously, he had stated in the leading judgment in Anderton v Ryan [1985] that impossibility WAS a defence to an attempt. The facts of the case were that the defendant thought he was smuggling drugs into the UK. In fact, he was merely importing a harmless vegetable matter. He was convicted of attempting to smuggle a prohibited substance and his appeal was dismissed all the way to the House of Lords.
8. The facts of this case must be more or less unique! The defendant got drunk on a night out and decided to stay with her boyfriend. She collapsed into the back of a taxi and mumbled his address. The taxi misheard her and dropped her outside another house in the same street which happened to be identical to the defendant's boyfriend's house. The defendant stumbled out of the car and, (unsurprisingly, given that he was in another house altogether) failing to make her boyfriend hear her knocks on the door, decided to break a window so she could sleep on the sofa. She duly did so, believing that he would have consented if he'd known what she was going to do. When she awoke in the morning, it was to find an elderly lady screaming at her to get out. She was convicted of criminal damage, but this was overturned on appeal.
9. This charming chappie was responsible for the courts developing the "continuing transaction" theory. The defendant was parking his car when a police officer told him to move it and park elsewhere. The defendant did exactly as he was told - he parked the car on the officer's foot. When the officer - undoubtedly slightly less politely than previously - asked him again to move it, the defendant responded "Screw you, you can wait". Strictly speaking, the defendant should not have been guilty of assault occasioning actual bodily harm contrary to section 47 Offences Against the Person Act 1861, because that is an offence which cannot be committed by omission. However, the Queen's Bench Division managed to get around that by stating that the offence had begun when the defendant drove onto the officer's foot mistakenly, and continued in a transaction until he - eventually - drove off it.
10. This case is - hopefully - a complete aberration in that the Court of Appeal deliberately chose to follow the Privy Council rather than the House of Lords, thus ignoring the rule of stare decisis which underpins the common law system. The case dealt with the issue of provocation. The House of Lords held in Smith (Morgan) [1999] that the defendant's personal characteristics should be attributable to the "reasonable man" when deciding whether or not a reasonable man would have lost control. The Privy Council, in Luc Thiet Thuan [1995] and Attorney-General for Jersey v Holley [2005], held that they should not. The Court of Appeal, the following year, chose to follow the Privy Council because it had been stated in the judgment of that case that the decision was intended to clarify the law of England, though it also noted that the decision in this case was not licence for the Court of Appeal ever to depart from the accepted rules of precedent again.
Source: Author
VerticalDancer
This quiz was reviewed by FunTrivia editor
Bruyere before going online.
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