Legal Elements of an Offense/crime

LEGAL ELEMENTS OF AN OFFENSE/CRIME

An offense is an illegal act that breaks the law. The laws of a country are made through and voted into law by parliament. The laws passed by parliament are called acts or statutes. These acts state what is prohibited and anyone who engages in these prohibitions commits an offense or crime for that matter. There are two universally accepted elements of a crime/offense Actus Reus and Mens Rea. These two principles are regarded by all jurisdictions whether in America jurisdictions or commonwealth countries.

ActusReus;

A)     Deed of commission;

 This connotes a deed or physical results of human conduct. The actus reus may be defined as human conduct as the law seeks to prevent. The deed defined in law may be either simple or made up of several stated facts. Actus reus is meant to deal with the objective facts regardless of intention. Actus reus is a result of a conduct and therefore an event. The crime is constituted by the event and not by the activity that caused the event. It is only such events as the law has chosen to forbid that are crimes. A deed may consist of harm and destruction of property and even life but it is not a crime unless the circumstances are such that it is legally prohibited. The law may command or permit harm to be inflicted for example an executioner, discipline of a child by a parent, a surgeon.

B)     Result of omission;

This also led to the converse idea that a man could incur no liability if harm resulted as result of him/her doing nothing at all. No one is held criminally responsible for harmful consequences of his omission to act whether that omission is careless or intentional unless the prosecution can prove that he was under a legal obligation to take action. With few exceptions no duty under common law rests upon a person to take action or protect others unless he directly or indirectly undertaken to do so. Such exceptions include;

·         Duties of a citizen to help police

·         Captain of a ship to save his passengers

·         Parenthood

·         Employment

·         Protection of the elderly

MENS REA;

A)     Objective standard of morality;

Mens rea is that condition of the mind. It is held to be a necessary condition of liability to punishment. In the courts recognition of the mental element was a gradual process and it begun with irregularities. The facts of the case were studied to see whether the prisoner’s behavior did or did not reach the moral standard generally accepted at the time or period. The courts went on the assumption that their standard of what was wrong or right was the true one. It was then shown to the prisoner that he had not conducted himself to the moral code of the today.

B)     The emergence of a subjective standard;

The courts also had to consider the actual working of the mind for example mistake of fact, insanity, and compulsion.

Advantages of mens rea;

·         Rules of morality are unstable and change from time to time. Therefore with the introduction of the mental element, the court was/is able to judge the subjective facts of the case on the basis of present day conventions without reverting to past or outdated practices.

·         Led many to the consideration of the actual intention of the prisoner and therefore to the decision as to the existence of subjective facts.

·         Gave court a new way of circumventing some practical difficulties in the law of homicide caused by the old rule of liability for example self defense where the convict had to seek a royal pardon which was expensive. However this was replaced by the jury who could acquit.

·         Mistake of fact became an accepted defense.

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