Causation: Forseeability v Natural Consequences
| Date | 01 July 1992 |
| Published date | 01 July 1992 |
| Author | Stephen Shute |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2230.1992.tb00936.x |
The
Modem
Law
Review
[Vol.
55
Causation: Forseeability
v
Natural Consequences
Stephen Shute
*
Two months after the Court of Appeal’s troublesome decision in
R
v
Cheshire,’
the High Court of Australia was also confronted with the complexities of causation
in
Royall
v
The Queen.2
The court’s decision is an interesting and important one.
Unlike
Cheshire,
which involved inadequate medical treatment by a third party,
the threat to the causal nexus
in
Royall
came from the actions of the victim herself.
The victim, H, died after falling from the small bathroom window of the sixth floor
flat that she shared with
R.
R
freely admitted that he had quarrelled violently
with
H just before her death, but denied that his actions had caused her to fall. Instead,
he claimed that she must have either fallen from the window accidentally, or taken
her own life voluntarily as a result of depression produced by epilepsy or amphetamine
abuse. The prosecution claimed that
R’s
actions were causally linked to H’s death.
They argued that he had killed H in one of three ways: either by pushing her out
of the window, or by physically attacking her
so
that she fell from the window while
trying to fend off the attack, or by producing in her a well-founded and reasonable
belief that her life was
in
danger, such that she concluded that her best chance of
survival lay in jumping from the window
in
order to escape.
At
the trial,
it
was the prosecution’s case that prevailed, although which version
of the events was accepted was left unclear.
R
was convicted of murder under
s
18
of the Crimes Act
1900
(NSW) and appealed, unsuccessfully, first to the New South
Wales Court of Criminal Appeal, and then to the Australian High Court. The case
on appeal centred around the trial judge’s direction to the jury. This led the court
into a general discussion of the principles governing causation in criminal cases.
All questions about causation depend intimately on their context. Questions about
legal causation are no exception. The fact that the legal inquiry is retrospective and
concerned with issues of attribution places a strong constraint on the nature of the
causal inquiry in law.
So
too does the jury system. If causal principles are incom-
prehensible to the ordinary juror, the criminal law
will
have little use for them.
For these and other reasons, the law tends to regard causation in terms of broad
generalisations based on common sense principles, rather than attempting to mimic
the more obscure approach to causation often taken by the philosopher or the scientist.
This common sense, everyday approach to causation underpins all the judgments
in
Royall
(although frequently coming hand-in-hand with the rather naive assumption
that the process is value free). The court
also
recognised that in complicated homicide
cases such as the present one, common sense causal principles may need explanation
before a jury will feel confident in applying them. In particular,
it
may be necessary
to remind the jury that a single eventuality may have more than one cause, lest it
is falsely assumed that the defendant may be held to have caused the death only
if
his act or omission was the sole, or the most immediate, cause of death.
The problem, of course, is that as soon as this complication is admitted, the question
arises as to whether the intervening cause or causes is sufficient to break the chain
of
causation and remove responsibility from the defendant.
It
was this issue that
divided the Australian High Court.
All
the judges agreed, following
R
v
Pageff3
*Fellow
of
Corpus Christi
College,
Oxford.
I
[
19911
3
All ER 670.
2 (1991)
65
AWR
451.
See
Stannard (1992)
55
MLR
577.
3
(1983)
76
Cr
App
R
279.
584
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