What is the difference between intent and causation

Causation and intervening acts in criminal cases Causation and intervening acts in criminal cases Practice notes. If factual causation cannot be established the prosecution will fail. Access this content for free with a trial of LexisPSL and benefit from: Instant clarification on points of law Smart search Workflow tools 36 practice areas.

Back Step 1 of 2 Basic information. Step 1 Step 2 Name. Miss Mrs. Name Click to edit. Name No Content These fields are required.

Email Email id Click to edit. Email No Content This field is required. Job role Click to edit. Job role No Content This field is required. Job title. Job title Click to edit. Job title No Content This field is required. Company Click to edit. Company No Content This field is required. Country Click to edit. Country No Content This field is required. This handles the question as to when an act goes from merely being thought of to actually happening. In this case Bob definitely had the intension to kill Leroy, and he took the shot so proximity is not an issue either.

Most of all since he took the shot it definitely was possible and would have been a murder if he connected. In terms of the law it can be further simplified to focus on fault and conduct. All this brings into account the principle of causation. And from that we add to its relation to. Get Access. Good Essays. America Needs Capital Punishment. Read More. Capital Punishment Words 2 Pages. Capital Punishment. Comparing Two Arguments on Capital Punishment.

Better Essays. Powerful Essays. Lawmakers Create Crimes to Prevent Crimes. Murder Case Study Words 3 Pages. Murder Case Study. Why should we ask two culpability questions in determining blameworthiness? The only way the foreseeability test avoids redundancy is by moving toward the other alternative here, the harm-within-the-risk test.

That is, the law could have said that in situations where the defendant was culpable in intending, foreseeing, or unreasonably risking some harm type H , but what his act in fact caused was an instance of harm type J , one should ask whether J was foreseeable, a different question than the one asked and answered as a matter of mens rea which was about H. Moreover, it is to do such work badly. Foreseeability is not the right question to ask in order to fit the harm in fact caused by a defendant to the type of harm with respect to which she was culpable either because she intended to achieve, or foresaw that she would cause, or unreasonably risked achieving, such a harm.

If to avoid redundancy the foreseeability test is to be restricted to this non-redundant work, it is better abandoned for the harm-within-the-risk test. Like the foreseeability test, this test purports to be a test of legal cause that is universally applicable to all tort and criminal cases. This test, too, is justified on policy grounds and does not pretend to have anything to do with factual or scientific causation.

Doctrinally, however, the test differs from a simple foreseeability test. Consider first the arena from which the test takes its name, which is from crimes or torts of risk creation. If it was negligent to drop a can of nitroglycerin because it might explode and kill the victim, but instead it kills him by cutting his toe and causing him to bleed to death, then the harm that happened bleeding was not within the risk of harm explosion that made it negligent to drop the can American Law Institute Extension of this test to non-risk-creation crimes or torts requires some modification.

For crimes or torts of strict liability, where no mens rea is required, the test requires that the harm that happened be one of the types of harms the risk of which motivated the lawmaker to prohibit the behavior. As it happens, the victim turns suddenly as she is being hit, and loses her right ear to the blow. Whether the harm that happened right ear loss is an instance of the type of harm intended left eye loss is what is called the fit problem.

Fact finders have to fit the mental state the defendant had to the actual result he achieved and ask whether it is close enough for him to be punished for a crime of intent like mayhem. If it is not close enough, then he may yet be found guilty of some lesser tort or crime of battery or reckless endangerment.

Proponents of this test urge that legal cause, properly understood, is really a mens rea doctrine, not a doctrine of causation at all American Law Institute The main problem for the harm-within-the-risk test does not lie in any of the directions we have just explored with respect to foreseeability as a test.

The harm-within-the-risk test is in the service of a justice-oriented policy in its seeking of a true desert-determiner culpable mental state , and it does not ask a redundant question. To grade culpability by the mental states of intention, foresight, and risk, we do have to match the harm done to the type of harm intended, foreseen, or unreasonably risked.

Consider this last question in light of two well-known sorts of legal cause cases. Hit the proverbial thin-skulled man, and you have legally caused his death if he dies, no matter how rare his condition might be. This is hard to square with the harm-within-the-risk test. A defendant who intends to hit or to cut does not necessarily or even usually intend to kill.

A defendant who foresees that his acts will cause the victim to be struck or cut, does not necessarily or even usually foresee that the victim will die. A defendant who negligently risks that his acts will cause a victim to be struck or cut is not necessarily or even usually negligent because he risked death. Suppose the defendant sets explosives next to a prison wall intending to blow the wall and to get certain inmates out. He foresees to a practical certainty that the explosion will kill the guard on the other side of the wall.

He lights the fuse to the bomb and leaves. As it happens, the fuse goes out. However, a stranger passes by the wall, sees the bomb, and relights the fuse for the pleasure of seeing an explosion; or, alternatively, lightning hits the fuse, reigniting it and setting off the bomb.

When the guard on the other side of the wall is killed by the blast, standard doctrines of intervening causation hold that the defendant did not legally cause the death of the guard.

Yet this is hard to square with the result that seemingly should obtain under the harm-within-the-risk test. After all, did not the defendant foresee just the type of harm an instance of which did occur? Because the harm-within-the-risk question asks a simple type-to-token question—was the particular harm that happened an instance of the type of harm whose foresight by the defendant made him culpable—the test is blind to freakishness of causal route Moore a: ch.

This language was not intended as a general, stand-alone test of proximate causation, as it is sometimes construed to be Dan-Cohen Rather, the language gives a qualifying caveat to the more general harm within the risk test of the Model Penal Code. Such a caveat is an explicit recognition of the inability of the harm-within-the-risk test to accommodate the issues commonly adjudicated as intervening cause issues.

Such a recognition is not nearly broad enough to cover the inadequacy of the harm-within-the-risk approach. The basic problem with the test is that it ignores all the issues traditionally adjudicated under the concept of legal cause. The harm-within-the-risk test asks a question that well serves justice-oriented theories of torts and criminal law, but it asks it in the wrong place and in substitution of other questions needing an answer for desert to be assessed.

We turn now from the policy-based tests of proximate causation to those tests based on the view that proximate causation, like cause in fact, has to do with real causal relations in the world. The simple idea behind such a remoteness test is that causation is a scalar relation—a more-or-less sort of thing, not an all-or-nothing sort of thing—and that it peters out over time.

A criticism of the remoteness test, often voiced in the legal literature, is that distance in space and remoteness in time are irrelevant to degrees of causal contribution. Examples like People v. Botkin , where poisoned candy went a great distance from California to the victim in New Jersey , or an undetonated bomb left buried for many years before it explodes and injures a victim, are trotted out in support of the criticism.

Justice Cardozo rejoined that such criticism surely ran counter to strong community sentiment that spatiotemporal distance does matter to degrees of causal contribution Bird v. Paul F. Spatiotemporal distance is perhaps a serviceable proxy for the number of events or states of affairs through which a cause exerts its influence on its effects, and the number of events could be relevant to the degree of causal contribution.

On the contrary, chains can be sufficiently direct for the direct cause test even though they are quite long chains extending over considerable space and time. The heart of the direct cause test is thus the idea that there are these chain-breaking, intervening causes. One can see their concept most easily in three steps. Third, such voluntary human action and abnormal natural events cause a given effect only if some other voluntary human action or abnormal natural event does not intervene between the first such event and its putative effect.

Causation in the law fades out gradually as much it breaks off suddenly, and the direct cause analysis ignores this. The problems with the conventional legal analysis of causation—in terms of a bifurcation into cause in fact and proximate causation—have tempted some legal theorists to abandon the bifurcation of causation in the law and to search for a unitary notion of causation that is much more discriminating in what it allows as a cause than the hopelessly promiscuous counterfactual cause-in-fact test of the conventional analysis.

Indeed, the search is for a unitary concept of causation that is so discriminating that it can do the work that on the conventional analysis is done by both cause-in-fact and proximate cause doctrines. It is far from obvious that causation is in fact a sufficiently discriminating relation that it can do this much work in assigning responsibility. Nonetheless, there are three such proposals in the legal literature, each having some doctrinal support in the law.

One we have seen already in the fourth variation in the counterfactual test for cause in fact. Whether one puts it as causation the aspect-cause view , or as culpability the harm-within-the-risk view , the discriminating power is roughly the same. A second unified view of causation in the law is the oldest of these kinds of proposals. It conceives of causation as a metaphysical primitive. Causation is not reducible to any other sort of thing or things, so there is little by way of an analysis that one can say about it and so very little that juries should be told about it Smith The one thing we can say is that the causal relation is a scalar relation, which is to say, a matter of degree.

One thing can be more of a cause of a certain event than another thing. Given the scalarity of causation, all the law need do is draw the line for liability somewhere on the scale marking degrees of causal contribution. On matters that vary on a smooth continuum, it is notoriously arbitrary to pick a precise break-point; where is the line between middle age and old age, red and pink, bald and not-bald, or caused and not-caused? To the common objection that the test tells us little, its defenders reply that that is a virtue, not a vice, for there is little to be said about causation.

Ohio , without need of general definitions and tests Borgo The third and last of these unified notions of causation is physicalist in its ambitions. Some theorists have thought that we can say more about the nature of the causal relation than that it is scalar and that a substantial amount of it is required for responsibility. On this third view, the nature of causation is to be found in the mechanistic concepts of physics: matter in motion, energy, force Beale , ; Epstein This test is similar to the substantial factor view in its conceiving the causal relation to be scalar but differs in its reductionist ambitions: causation is not a primitive but can be reduced to some kind of physical process.

This view handles easily the overdetermination cases that are such a problem for the conventional analysis. When two fires join, two bullets strike simultaneously, two motorcycles scare the same horse, each is a cause of the harm because each is doing its physical work.

When one non-mortal wound is inflicted together with a larger, mortal wound and the victim dies of loss of blood, each is a cause of death because each did some of the physical work loss of blood leading to death People v. One suspects that some such view is often applied by jurors, but unless theorists can spell out the general nature of the relation being intuitively applied by jurors, this test tends to collapse to the metaphysically sparer because primitivist substantial factor test.

As we have seen, the Anglo-American law of torts and of crimes has a bafflingly large number of conceptions of legal causation.

Displayed below is a review of what has been described above, organized by the variables discussed earlier. Although it is possible to hold the view that causation in the law shares nothing with causation in science and in everyday life save use of the same word , such a view is very counterintuitive; some relation between the two concepts of causation surely exists.

That leaves two more plausible views of this relation. A strong view of this relation would be that the concepts are the same. Typically, an intervening superseding cause cuts the defendant off from criminal liability because it is much closer, or proximate , to the resulting harm Connecticut Jury Instructions No.

If an intervening superseding cause is a different individual acting with criminal intent, the intervening individual is criminally responsible for the harm caused. Change the example so that Henry pulls out a knife and chases Mary out of the garage. Mary escapes Henry and hides in an abandoned shed. Half an hour later, Wes, a homeless man living in the shed, returns from a day of panhandling.

When he discovers Mary in the shed, he kills her and steals her money and jewelry. Because of modern technology, victims often stay alive on machines for many years after they have been harmed. A few states have rules that solve this dilemma. Some states have either a one year and a day rule or a three years and a day rule S. Under one or three years and a day rules, the victim of a criminal homicide must die within the specified time limits for the defendant to be criminally responsible.

If the victim does not die within the time limits, the defendant may be charged with attempted murder , rather than criminal homicide. California makes the timeline a rebuttable presumption that can be overcome with evidence proving that the conduct was criminal and the defendant should still be convicted Cal.

Penal Code, State, Tennessee, Death timeline rules are not to be confused with the statute of limitations , which is the time limit the government has to prosecute a criminal defendant. Answer the following questions. Check your answers using the answer key at the end of the chapter. California Criminal Jury Instructions No. Connecticut Jury Instructions No.