Читать книгу Criminal Law - Mark Thomas - Страница 114

This principle is merely a reflection of that considered above in legal causation. Essentially, the defendant must remain the imputable, or legal, cause of the end result. In R v Rafferty [2007] EWCA Crim 1846, the Court of Appeal quashed a defendant’s conviction for manslaughter on account that his co-defendants (who were convicted of murder) had broken the chain of causation by inflicting further injuries on the victim and leaving him in a dangerous state in the absence of the defendant. Rafferty is one of those few cases in which the chain of causation has been broken by an act of a third party.

A useful way to demonstrate this particular area of law, and its development, is by looking at two different examples:

(i) cases involving driving offences; and

(ii) cases involving medical intervention.