Ratio Decidendi
Necessity is not a defence to murder. The deliberate killing of an innocent person, however extreme the circumstances and however genuine the belief that killing was necessary to preserve the lives of others, constitutes murder. No utilitarian calculus โ that the death of one will save many โ can justify taking an innocent life. The case also establishes that a special verdict of guilty can be reserved for consideration of the full court where a novel point of law arises.
Ffeithiau
Thomas Dudley (captain) and Edward Stephens (mate) were shipwrecked in the South Atlantic on 5 July 1884 when their yacht, the Mignonette, sank. They were adrift in an open dinghy with a crew member, Brooks, and Richard Parker, a 17-year-old orphaned cabin boy. After approximately 20 days at sea with no food and only what rainwater they could collect, Parker fell seriously ill, having drunk seawater. On 25 July, Dudley and Stephens decided to kill and eat Parker rather than all four die. They killed Parker by cutting his throat and all three survivors fed on his body and blood. They were rescued on 29 July by the German vessel Montezuma. On return to England, Dudley and Stephens were tried for murder at Exeter Assizes. A special verdict was returned by the jury finding the facts, and the case was reserved for the Queen's Bench Division to determine whether those facts constituted murder.
Crynodeb o'r dyfarniad
Lord Coleridge CJ, delivering the judgment of the court (comprising himself, Grove J, Denman J, Stephen J, and Huddleston B), held that the defendants were guilty of murder. The court firmly rejected the defence of necessity in all its forms as applied to murder. Lord Coleridge drew on legal authority from Hale's Pleas of the Crown and from ethical principle, holding that it would be impossible to select who should be sacrificed, and that to allow such a defence would be to set a dangerous precedent. He acknowledged the extreme hardship of the case and expressed profound sympathy for the defendants, but insisted that to acquit them would be to say that the weakest and most helpless in extremity had the least claim to the protection of the law. The defendants were convicted of murder and sentenced to death, but the death sentence was subsequently commuted by the Crown to six months' imprisonment, reflecting the unique circumstances.
Dyfyniadau allweddol
"It is not correct to say that there is any absolute or unqualified necessity to preserve one's life. Lord Bacon himself says that self-preservation is not the highest necessity."
โ Lord Coleridge CJ at 287
"Who is to be the judge of this sort of necessity? By what measure is the comparative value of lives to be measured? Is it to be strength, or intellect, or what?"
โ Lord Coleridge CJ at 287
"We are often compelled to set up standards we cannot ourselves reach up to, and to lay down rules which we could not ourselves satisfy. It is enough for us to lay down the rule without giving a judgment upon the conduct of those who fall below our standard."
โ Lord Coleridge CJ at 288
Triniaeth ddilynol
Consistently followed as the authority that necessity cannot be a defence to murder. Affirmed by the House of Lords in R v Howe [1987] AC 417, which held duress also unavailable to a charge of murder.
Distinguished in Re A (Children) (Conjoined Twins: Surgical Separation) [2001] 2 WLR 480, where the Court of Appeal held that separation surgery killing one twin to save the other was not murder, on the basis that the doctrine of double effect and the unique medical context took it outside Dudley and Stephens.
Discussed extensively in R v Hasan [2005] UKHL 22, where the House of Lords reaffirmed that the courts must be strict in limiting necessity and duress defences so as not to open the floodgates to spurious claims.
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