''R v Woollin'' was an English criminal law case in which the

House of Lords The House of Lords is the upper house of the Parliament of the United Kingdom. Like the lower house, the House of Commons of the United Kingdom, House of Commons, it meets in the Palace of Westminster in London, England. One of the oldest ext ...

clarified the type of

intention An intention is a mental state in which a person commits themselves to a course of action. Having the plan to visit the zoo tomorrow is an example of an intention. The action plan is the ''content'' of the intention while the commitment is the ...

required to establish the

mens rea In criminal law, (; Law Latin for "guilty mind") is the mental state of a defendant who is accused of committing a crime. In common law jurisdictions, most crimes require proof both of ''mens rea'' and '' actus reus'' ("guilty act") before th ...

murder Murder is the unlawful killing of another human without justification (jurisprudence), justification or valid excuse (legal), excuse committed with the necessary Intention (criminal law), intention as defined by the law in a specific jurisd ...

. The House ultimately quashed Woollin’s murder conviction and substituted a conviction of

manslaughter Manslaughter is a common law legal term for homicide considered by law as less culpable than murder. The distinction between murder and manslaughter is sometimes said to have first been made by the ancient Athenian lawmaker Draco in the 7th ce ...

Facts

Having given various explanations for his three-month-old son's injuries in the ambulance and in the first two police interviews, Woollin eventually admitted that he had 'lost his cool' when his son would not stop crying for hours. He had picked him up, shaken him and thrown him across the room with considerable force towards a pram next to a wall about away. He stated that he had not intended nor thought that he would kill the child and had not wanted the child to die. His actions caused the infant's death as the child hit the floor hard, missing the pram.

Appeals

Woollin's murder conviction was upheld in the

Court of Appeal An appellate court, commonly called a court of appeal(s), appeal court, court of second instance or second instance court, is any court of law that is empowered to Hearing (law), hear a Legal case, case upon appeal from a trial court or other ...

. The House of Lords, not the lower court, gave leave to appeal as the

jury instructions Jury instructions, also known as charges or directions, are a set of legal guidelines given by a judge to a jury in a court of law. They are an important procedural step in a trial by jury, and as such are a cornerstone of criminal process in many ...

were that there had to be "substantial risk" of death or grievous bodily harm, which was held to be far wider in scope than virtual certainty; and the actions duly considered in the round on the facts stated as proven by the jury fell short of virtual certainty. The Lords quashed the conviction. Lord Steyn affirmed the test in '' R v Nedrick'', and Lord Hope of Craighead substituted the verb 'infer' for more common 'find', in the formula by which the jury can find indirect intention, i.e. the intention of the person who does not aim to kill or even to cause

grievous bodily harm Assault occasioning grievous bodily harm (often abbreviated to GBH) is a term used in English criminal law to describe the severest forms of battery. It refers to two offences that are created by sections 18 and 20 of the Offences against the ...

but nonetheless takes (what he knows to be) an outrageously high risk of doing so to someone around, where the result of the action was ''virtually certain'' to be death or grievous bodily harm (objective test), and the defendant personally foresaw this (subjective test): That verb "entitles" rather than say "obliged" or "have to" connotes that they have no obligation to find the intention—it stresses the second limb requirement: they need to feel there is circumstantial evidence (or an admission) for a consensus that the defendant must surely have appreciated death or serious injury would almost certainly happen.

Reception

In ''R v Matthews and Alleyne'', 003Cr App R 30 the Court of Appeal concluded that the ''Woollin'' test was an evidential rather than substantial rule of law: judges ought to instruct jurors that they ''may'' interpret what they would see as certain knowledge on the defendant's part of the virtually certain consequence of death as evidence of intention, but ''Woollin'' does not substantively define a secondary type of intention. The formula is controversial per a large body of academic experts as it gives no illustrations of when knowledge can be rightly and wrongly imputed (ascribed to a person), and gives breadth for possible leniency on grounds unknown.

References

External links

Full Text of Case
{{English criminal law navbox W 1998 in England House of Lords cases 1998 in United Kingdom case law Incidents of violence against boys