Reasonable: The Most Consequential Word in the Criminal Law
| DOI | 10.1350/jcla.2014.78.3.911 |
| Date | 01 June 2014 |
| Published date | 01 June 2014 |
| Author | Gary Slapper |
| Subject Matter | Opinion |
OPINION
Reasonable: The Most Consequential Word in
the Criminal Law
Gary Slapper*
Global Professor, New York University, Director of New York University in
London, door tenant at 36 Bedford Row
In one respect, evidentially, the entirety of criminal law swings on a single
word: ‘reasonable’.
In Woolmington v DPP [1935] UKHL 1, Viscount Sankey, the Lord
Chancellor, affirmed the ‘golden thread’ of English law that it is the duty
of the prosecution to prove the prisoner’s guilt ‘beyond a reasonable
doubt’. Reginald Woolmington, a farm labourer, from Castleton, near
Sherborne, Dorset had been convicted at Bristol Assizes of killing his wife
Violet by shooting her through the heart. He said the incident was an
accident. His conviction was quashed because the trial judge had wrongly
told the jury that malice could be presumed in the circumstances subject
to being rebutted by the defendant. The ‘reasonable doubt’ formula had
been developed in the 18th century and crystallised in 1914 in R v
Abramovitch (1914) 11 Cr App R 45. So today, if a doubt in the minds of
magistrates or jurors is ‘reasonable’, the defendant must be acquitted.
Every case depends on how the word ‘reasonable’ is calibrated and
interpreted.
The word ‘reasonable’, however, plays an even wider role than its one
in the formula for the burden of proof. The word, and its grammatical
variants, is one of the most ubiquitous words in criminal law.
The recent decision of the Privy Council in Daniel v Trinidad and Tobago1
affords a good example. Mr Daniel had embarked upon a robbery at
gunpoint, intending to steal the victim’s car. He said that when he asked
for the car keys, the deceased had thrown a beer bottle at him and hit him
in the face, causing a cut under one eye. In a subsequent struggle, he said,
the deceased had kicked him in the groin. The defendant then shot the
victim dead. In upholding his conviction, the Privy Council noted that it
was very important that judges should respect the clear principle that the
question whether the objective part of the test for provocation had been
met, namely whether the provocation was such as might cause a reasonable
man to act as the accused had, was a matter for the jury. The Privy Council
also noted that provocation had to be left to the jury if, taking the evidence
at its most favourable to the defendant and remembering that the onus
was on the State to rebut it, manslaughter by reason of provocation was a
conclusion to which the jury might reasonably come.2
* The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect
the views of New York University, 36 Bedford Row, or The Journal of Criminal Law
1 [2014] UKPC 3, [2014] 2 All ER 461.
2 I have added emphasis to ‘reasonable’ and ‘reasonably’ here.
The Journal of Criminal Law (2014) 78 JCL 195–7 195
doi:10.1350/jcla.2014.78.3.911
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