Partial reform of partial defences: Developments in England and Wales
| Author | Celia Wells,Oliver Quick |
| DOI | 10.1177/0004865812456856 |
| Published date | 01 December 2012 |
| Date | 01 December 2012 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Australian & New Zealand
Journal of Criminology
45(3) 337–350
!The Author(s) 2012
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DOI: 10.1177/0004865812456856
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Article
Partial reform of partial
defences: Developments in
England and Wales
Oliver Quick
University of Bristol, UK
Celia Wells
University of Bristol, UK
Abstract
The offences of murder and manslaughter have been the subject of several Law Commission
reviews in England and Wales but no wholesale reform. The two major difficulties with the
law of murder have been the continuing commitment to the mandatory penalty and the
impossibility of capturing culpability in a nuanced way through the mechanics of the mental
element of ‘intention to cause death or serious bodily harm’. The long accepted solution to
these difficulties has been the use of partial defences of diminished responsibility and provo-
cation to reduce murder to manslaughter in some circumstances, despite the defendant
clearly having satisfied the mental element. In 2006, the Law Commission proposed a new
architecture of homicide offences which would have resulted in partial defence killings being
in the second of three categories of killing. This would have located them in the same bracket
as killings accompanied by either intention to cause serious injury or an intention to cause
injury coupled with a serious risk of causing death. Rather than adopt this new scheme, the
government fast tracked reform of partial defences but retained the current bifurcation
between murder and manslaughter. While diminished responsibility was retained, albeit
cast in slightly different terms, provocation was replaced by a defence of ‘loss of control’.
In this article we analyse these changes, consider the statutory consolidation of the law of
self-defence, and point up the continuing incoherence and confusion in this area.
Keywords
diminished responsibility, homicide, law reform, loss of control, self-defence
Fatal violence and the structure of homicide
Fatal violence is relatively rare in England and Wales with 636 homicides recorded in
2010/11. This figure has remained fairly stable as have statistics in relation to the char-
acter of victims. The majority of homicide victims are male (68% of victims) and female
Corresponding author:
Oliver Quick, Law School, University of Bristol, Bristol, BS8 1RJ, United Kingdom.
Email: oliver.quick@bristol.ac.uk
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