Читать книгу Criminal Law - Mark Thomas - Страница 18

Horder (Ashworth’s Principles of Criminal Law, 9th edn (OUP, 2019)) states that the concern of fair labelling is as follows:

… to see that widely felt distinctions between kinds of offences and degrees of wrongdoing are respected and signalled by the law, and that offences are subdivided and labelled so as to represent fairly the nature and magnitude of the law-breaking.

In essence, there must be an accurate and visible link between the label (ie the name of the offence) and the conduct criminalised. The fairness of labelling is relevant for two main reasons:

•It promotes the fair warning principle in that people who understand the label associated with the offence will inevitably understand the offence and what they can and cannot do.

•It promotes transparency and objectivity in the criminal justice system by stigmatising individuals with an accurate label (eg a rapist or a murderer).

The key in this discussion, however, is on the concept of fair labelling. One of the biggest criticisms of the law of murder is the fact that an individual may be guilty of murder where they kill but did not intend to kill; rather, they intended to cause serious harm. Is it appropriate, or ‘fair’, to label these individuals as murderers in circumstances where they lacked the actual intention to kill? The label must fit the crime.