Assignment task: Based on the reading, (Chapters 3&4 of you're the text Criminal Law, by Nicola Padfield), answer the following questions:
1. Dee bakes Phil a birthday cake. Intending to kill him, she puts poison in the cake. Phil takes the cake home and eats it. Dee then has second thoughts and goes to Phil's home where she finds him seriously ill. She calls an ambulance, but Phil dies before it arrives. Discuss Dee's liability
2. Dee wishes to collect the insurance money on her house, so sets fire to it knowing that Phil might be asleep upstairs. Would English law say that she intended to kill Phil?
3. Dee is sleeping rough and spends three nights in an old barn. She is freezing cold and sets fire to a pile of old rubbish in the barn. The fire gets out of control so Dee leaves to find somewhere else to sleep. The barn is destroyed. Medical evidence says that Dee has a mental age of 8. Is she reckless?
4. If a patient dies due to medical incompetence, how incompetent does a doctor have to have been before a jury may judge him to have been grossly negligent, and therefore guilty of manslaughter?
5. Is the imposition of strict liability ever justified?
6. Dee and Bee, both aged 13, are playing with a plastic gun. They point it at close range at a pensioner, Phil, and demand that he hands over his money. Phil is terrified and has a heart attack. He dies two days later. Dee and Bee maintain that they were only having fun and thought that Phil would know it was a game. Discuss Dee's liability.
7. Dee believes that fairies live in the corner of the public park, and that they must never be disturbed. When she sees Phil, a gardener, stacking flowerpots in the area where she believes the fairies live, she chases him away by throwing bricks at him. One grazes him on the arm as he flees. Discuss Dee's liability.
8. Dee, a diabetic, is charged with dangerous driving. Her defense is that her doctor has been experimenting with a new regime of insulin treatment, and she was not sure whether in fact she had injected herself with the correct dose that morning. Medical evidence suggests that she might have been in a hypoglycemic condition at the time the police stopped her. Discuss Dee's liability.
9. David has sex with Violet without her consent. Is he criminally liable if he had been drinking heavily and thought she was consenting? Would your advice to him be different if he had been drinking orange juice which had been laced with neat lab alcohol by his so-called friends?
10. Should companies be liable to criminal conviction?