Clearly (and logically), an essential element of the crime would be missing and so the accused could not be convicted of it. 443, the House of Lords (as it then was) held that an accused would not be guilty of a crime of specific intent if he was so heavily intoxicated at the time of committing the crime that he did not have the requisite specific intent. In a landmark decision in DPP v Majewski A.C. Regular examples are manslaughter, and unlawfully damaging property belonging to another being reckless as to whether such property would be damaged.
These are referred to as crimes of basic intent (as distinct from crimes of specific intent). Most criminal offences are satisfied by a lower level of foresight, namely awareness of the risk that one’s conduct will amount to the prohibited act or produce the prohibited consequence (recklessness). Specific intent denotes a high level of culpability or foresight on the part of the accused, and it is confined largely to a relatively small number of serious offences. Another straightforward example is wounding with intent to cause grievous bodily harm. The most well-known example is murder as that requires proof that the accused not only caused the death of another person unlawfully (the actus reus), but that he did so with intent to kill or cause grievous bodily harm (the mens rea).
It can, however, appear to operate as a defence, limited to crimes which require proof that the accused acted with the specific intent to produce a prohibited consequence (specific intent offences). Strictly speaking, voluntary intoxication is not a defence to a criminal charge in English (or Irish) criminal law. In a decision handed down some weeks ago in People (DPP) v Eadon IESC 98, the Irish Supreme Court addressed another aspect of the law that has given rise to some confusion in the past. Their efforts have not always been consistent across time and place and, as every first-year law student will know, they still incorporate a frustrating degree of uncertainty on at least one critical element. 479, the courts in the common law world have charted a path through this dilemma by attempting to strike a workable balance between public policy and principle. That, however, could produce the incendiary spectacle of large numbers of accused persons being seen to avoid criminal liability, essentially because they had voluntarily consumed so much alcohol and/or drugs that they were not sufficiently aware of what they were doing at the time in question.īeginning with the House of Lords decision in DPP v Beard A.C. If, as will often be the case, such foresight is lacking due to the effects of intoxication, it should follow that there is no criminal liability. Generally, a pre-requisite for liability in criminal law is foresight of the risk that one’s criminal act or omission will produce the prohibited consequence in the offence in question. The criminal law, however, has struggled to deal with its impact on culpability in a consistent, coherent and principled manner. Intoxication from the effects of alcohol and/or drugs is often present in the commission of offences against the person, sexual offences, criminal damage and public order offences.