It is a general principle in criminal law that for a person’s liability to be established it must be shown that the defendant possessed the necessary mens rea at the time the actus reus was committed. Therefore the two must coincide. This is also known as the contemporaneity rule.
In most instances this rule does not create a problem for example the attacker who strikes his victim with a crow bar or the murderer who reportedly stabs the victim. However there have been several real cases where this issue has been the central legal question, which has to be resolved in order for the defendant to be convicted. The court have developed ways of finding coincidence of actus reus and mens rea in 2 situations which are continuing acts and chain of events.
Continuing Acts
Where the actus reus involves a continuing act a later mens
rea during its continuance can coincide. In the case of Fagan v MPC when D was
told to park his car at a particular place, he accidently drove onto the
officer’s foot. After being told, the D refused to remove the car but
eventually complied. He was convicted of assaulting a constable and his appeal
was dismissed. The court said the actus reus was a continuing act and coincided
at some point with the requisite mens rea
Chain of events
The second way the courts have dealt with the problem is to
consider a chain of events to be a continuing actus reus for the purpose of the
criminal law. If the actus reus for the purpose of the criminal law. If the
actus reus and the mens rea are both present at some point during this chain of
events, then there is liability.
This is demonstrated in the case of R v Thabo Meli the four
appellants were convicted of murder. They had planned to kill a man and then
made it look like an accident. They took him to a hut and beat him over the
head. Believing that he was dead, they then took his body to a cliff and threw
it off. Medical evidence showed that the deceased died from exposure of being
left at the bottom of the cliff and not from the blow to the head. They
appealed against their convictions on the grounds that the actus reus and mens
rea of the crime did not coincide. That is to say when they formed the
intention to kill, there was no actus reus as the man was still alive. When
they threw him off the cliff, there was no mens rea as they can intend to kill
someone they believed was already dead. However the convictions where upheld.
The act of beating him and throwing him off the cliff was one continuing act
The Privy Council held that the correct view of what the defendants had done was to treat the chain of events actus reus. The actus reus of causing death started with the victim being struck on the head and continued until he died of exposure. It was sufficient for the prosecution to establish that at some time during that chain of events the defendants had acted with the requisite mens rea.
In the case of R v Le Brun 1991 the defendant knocked his
wife unconscious. He dragged her away to avoid detection, whist dragging her
she hit her head on the kerb fracturing her skull, and she died. The original
unlawful act with its accompanying mens rea was not the direct cause of death,
but the unlawful act and the act causing death were part of the same sequence
of events, and that was sufficient to be guilty of manslaughter.
In conclusion, from the above cases, it can be seen that in
few instances where it has been argued as a defence that the actus reus and
mens rea do not coincide, the courts have been taken a robust and realistic
line that, provided there is a series of linked transactions or continuing
acts, it does not matter that the actus reus and mens rea do not precisely
coincide.
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