3 - Motive and intention

Summary

It is lamentable that, after more than a thousand years of continuous legal development, English law should still lack clear and consistent definitions of words expressing its basic concepts.

(Williams, 1983, 73)

A consideration of motives requires and indicates a much more advanced level of ethical criticism than is involved in appraisals based only on the fact that a harm was inflicted intentionally, not by accident.

(Hall, 1960, 83)

Introduction

Criminal liability for those crimes that are conventionally recognised as the most serious requires not only that a criminal act occur but that the individual be responsible for it through possessing a ‘guilty mind’. Mens rea signifies this:

In Latin it means a guilty mind, but in legal use it denotes the mental state (subjective element) required for the particular crime in question. Or it can refer to the mental state commonly required for serious crimes (and a number of lesser offences).

(Williams, 1983, 73)

Mens rea is a shorthand term denoting the existence of either intention to commit a crime, or recklessness (running a risk) as to whether a crime will occur as a result of one’s actions. In this chapter we deal with intention, saving recklessness until Chapter 4. Discussion of mens rea, as Williams’s definition suggests, may be crime-specific, ie focused upon the particular mental element for a given crime, or more general, considering the common features of the mental element across a range of crimes. It is the latter aspect that is of more interest to us, given our concern with the law’s general principles.