Sobering Up? The Law Commission on Criminal Intoxication

The Law Commission has now published its final report on intoxication and criminal liability.' Its new proposals are a vast improvement on those originally proposed in the initial Consultation Paper.* In the Consultation Paper, the Law Commission found itself unable, as a matter of principle, to make sense of the distinction between crimes of basic and of specific intent that has underpinned the common law governing voluntary intoxication (more or less ambiguously) for one hundred years or longer. At common law, intoxication is evidence that can be employed to deny mens reu in crimes of specific intent. Such evidence is, though, inadmissible for this purpose where crimes of basic intent are in issue, even where the mens reu in question involves an element of subjective awarene~s.~ I shall pursue this issue below. So, wedded to an unyielding subjectivism, the Commission tentatively proposed to make redundant the distinction between crimes of basic and of specific intent by allowing evidence of intoxication to be employed wherever this tended to show that the accused lacked the requisite (subjective element of) mens reu. Well aware, however, that such a boldly subjectivist proposal would meet with fierce opposition, not least from the general public, the Commission proposed that a separate offence of 'criminal intoxication' should be created. One would be convicted of this offence when, having become 'deliberately intoxicated to a substantial extent,' one caused certain listed kinds of harms whether one was acting with mens reu or not, and even if one was acting in a state of aut~matism.~ This ill-conceived proposal was, to use the Commission's own words (1.26), 'rejected outright with cogent and persuasive reasons' by almost all influential groups working in the criminal justice system. I shall not waste space by adding my own criticisms to the proposal here. So with what does the Commission's final Report replace its own initial proposals

Citation · Commission · Criminal law · Mathematics education · Political science · TUTOR · Criminal Justice and Corrections Analysis · Criminal Law and Evidence · Law · Psychology

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