CAUSATION AND

CRIME
Concept of Causation
Indian Penal Code
Class 2
Only 5 Months
Remaining!
Law Entrance Exam 2021
 Kriti Bhatnagar

● B.A LLB, NLIU Bhopal (2019)

● LLM, GNLU Gujarat (2020)
● Cleared UGC NET (2020)
● CLAT - All India Rank 339
Vast Syllabus vs Limited Time
5+ Subjects
Board Exams
20+ Books
Limited Time
New Pattern
Exclusive CLAT Batches
The Unacademy Advantage
 Subscribe Now
and Get 10%
Extra Off!
Apply Code:
KRITIB

KRITIB
CONCOMITANT CIRCUMSTANCES
Act to be Prohibited by Law

Act Should Result in Harm

Act to be Direct Cause of Harm

Essential Ingredients for crimes

ACTUS REUS

MENS REA

CAUSATION
CAUSATION IN CRIMES
Factor no. 1 + Factor no. 2 + Factor no. 3…. Factor no. n = EVENT
WHAT IS A FACTOR?
CONDUCT AND PROHIBITED RESULT NEED TO BE RELATED

A man is usually held criminally liable only for the consequences of

his conduct as he foresaw (or in crimes of negligence, he ought to
have foreseen).

Despite the presence of both actus reus and mens rea, a criminal act
can be unsustainable in the eyes of law because of the absence/lack
of causation.
CAUSATION IN CRIMES
A intending to murder B puts a bomb in his car, B dies
because of the car accident with someone else but not
because of that bomb. Now in such a situation, IS A LIABLE?

It is best illustrated by Illustration (b) of Section 299 of The

Indian Penal Code, 1860. “A knows Z to be behind a bush. B
does not know it. A, intending to cause or knowing it to be
likely to cause Z’s death, induces B to fire at the bush. B fires
and kills Z. Here B may be guilty of no offence, but A has
committed the offence of culpable homicide.” In this
illustration, causation is used to establish the link between
actus reus and mens rea.
CAUSATION IN CRIMES
The act must be the causa causans, i.e., the immediate cause of the
effect.

“If the victim asks his way on a dark night and the accused with the
intention of causing his death, directs him to a path that he knows
will bring him to a cliff edge, and the victim suffers a fatal fall, is this
murder, though the accused had done nothing more than uttering
words”

Cause and effect rule.

CAUSATION IN CRIMES
A, intending to kill B, shoots at B but only wounds him very slightly. A
clearly has the requisite mens rea for murder, that is,
he foresees and desires B’s death. Now let us assume that on his being
taken to the hospital in an ambulance, a piece of masonry from a
building falls on the ambulance and kills B; or, alternatively, that B has a
rare blood disease which prevents his blood from coagulation so that the
slight wound leads to his death, which it would not have done if he had
not been suffering from this disease; or, alternatively, that B refuses to
have the wound treated and dies of blood poisoning, which would not
have occurred if B had the wound treated. In all these cases, a problem
of causation arises, i.e. did A cause B’s death for the purposes of the
criminal law so that he can be convicted of murder?
HOW TO ESTABLISH CAUSATION
Establishing Causation
For establishing the doctrine of causation, one must
investigate into ‘factual causation’ and ‘legal causation’,
thereby convicting anyone of legal liability.

Firstly, ‘factual causation’ must be established and then

followed by ‘legal causation’.
Establishing Factual Causation
There is a test namely ‘but for’ test. It says that but for the
defendant’s act the harm would not have occurred. A throw a big
stone at B. We ask, ‘But for A’s act, would B have been injured?’
The answer is ‘No. So we conclude that A caused the harm/injury to
B.

One shortcoming in the but-for test emerges in circumstances

where every one of a few acts alone is adequate to cause the
damage. For instance, if both X and Y fire what might alone be
lethal shots at Z at around a similar time, and C dies, it gets difficult
to state that but-for X’s shot, or but-for Y’s shot alone, Z would
have died. Taking the but-for test truly in such a case would appear
to make neither X nor Y liable for Z’s demise.
R vs WHITE
The defendant tried to kill his mother by putting poison in
her drink. His mother died shortly afterwards from a heart
attack.

What is his liability?

R v Pagett
The defendant shot at the police, and when the police fired
back at him, he used his girlfriend as a human shield. His
girlfriend was killed by the shots fired by the police, but was
he responsible?
Establishing Legal Causation
Whether the defendant’s act was the ‘operative’ and
‘substantial’ cause of death. Or was it the main cause
or the real cause. It is also based on the principle of
common sense.

A hit his leg into B’s chin and bleeding starts, she goes to
the hospital in the car and the car is struck by lightning and
B dies as a result, so factual causation but-for kicking her in
the chin, she would not have been in the car and she would
not have died, so A is the factual cause. The question here
is that ‘Is A the operative and substantial cause of her
death?’.
CAUSATION AND NEGLIGENCE
1. The conduct of the person was negligent
2. But for the negligent act of the accused, the event would not
have occurred.

MINIMUM CAUSATION
When the death of a person is caused after medical treatment, it
cannot be said that the treatment was not proper or inadequate,
or had better treatment been given, the death would not have
taken place. This is because, the intervention of the doctor is in
the nature of minimum causation and hence his intervention
would have played only a minor part, if any, in causing death.
PRINCIPLE OF REASONABLE FORESIGHT
The two basic tenets that have to be established in cases arising
under this principle are:
first to establish that death, grievous hurt or whatever the
offence that is to be established is the natural consequence of
the act of the offender;

and secondly, it has to be established that any reasonable man

would be able to foresee that the death, grievous injury, etc, is
likely to be the natural consequence of his act.
Novus Actus interveniens
Once Factual and Legal Causation is established, we will have
to investigate the things that can break the ‘chain of causation’.

The act could be the victim’s act, the act of a third party or an act
of god. However, not every intervening act qualifies as Novus
actus interveniens. The intervening act must be such that it is
not foreseeable or intended but, in some cases, when the
intervening act is a ‘free deliberate and informed act’ of another
agent, the original causation breaks despite the consequence
being an intended consequence.
Novus actus interveniens
Novus actus interveniens is Latin for a "new
intervening act". In the Law of Delict 6th
Edition, Neethling states that a novus actus
interveniens is "an independent event which,
after the wrongdoer's act has been concluded
either caused or contributed to the
consequence concerned".
A novus actus breaks the causal chain between
the initial wrongdoer's action and the liability
that is imputed to him or her as a result
thereof.
UNEXPECTED INTERVENTIONS

D prepares a poisoned apple with the intention of

giving it to his wife, V, to be eaten the next day. V
finds the poisoned apple in the meantime, eats it
and dies.

Or D is cleaning his gun with the intention of

shooting V the next day. The gun goes off
accidentally and kills V.
R v Blaue
A refusal by the victim to have medical treatment, which
might have saved her Life, does not break the chain of
causation.

Blaue attacked a girl with a knife, causing a serious wound,

which pierced her lung, necessitating surgery. The girl was
a Jehovah’s Witness and steadfastly refused to have a
blood transfusion, which was
necessary before the operation could take place, on the
ground that it was contrary to her religious beliefs, despite
being told that she would die otherwise. She died the next
day.
McKew v. Holland and Hannen and Cubitts (Scotland) Ltd

The plaintiff suffered an injury at the work, due to the

negligence of the defendant, which caused stiffening
and weakening of his leg. Shortly afterwards he went
to inspect a flat access to which was provided by a
steep staircase with no handrails. As he was about to
descend the stairs, his leg gave way, and to avoid
getting down head fist, he threw himself and landed
on his right leg, breaking an ankle. The plaintiff sued
the defendant, calling it a direct consequence of the
defendant’s negligence for the injury.
DOCTRINE OF TRANSFERRED MALICE

Inferred from Sec 301 IPC

Section 301 states that if a person does
any act which he knows or intends that is
likely to cause death, commits culpable
homicide and by causing the death of any
person, whose death he neither intends to
nor knows by himself that by his act will
cause the death of that person.
Question

‘S’ entered the house of ‘D’ with an

intent to commit robbery. ‘S’ demand
money from ‘D’. ‘D’ refused to give. Due
to this, ‘S’ fired at him suddenly. ‘D’s’
wife ‘R’ came in between them to
protect her husband and died due to
being shot in the head.
QUESTION
The defendant was in an argument with
another in a pub. The arguments between
the two increased rapidly. The defendant
took off his belt with an intention to hit
the man but he missed. The person he
was trying to hit only got a bit injured.
The smash with the belt got diverted in
another way and it hit an innocent
woman who was standing by the side of
the man. She got hit in her face and was
severely injured.
Rajbir Singh vs State Of U.P. & Anr on 8 March 2006
The appellant claimed that the neighbour threw some bricks
on the compound of his brother’s house. On account of this, a
verbal fight took place between his father and the accused but
the matter was somehow settled by the local people. The next
day accused with his two relatives came with guns. They
came near the shop of the complainant where his father was
standing. There, the accused persuade or encouraged his
relatives to kill him. The accused started firing at the father of
the complainant who then received injuries and fell down.

A girl came to that shop to purchase some articles from that

shop and suffered injuries and fell down. Both the injured
persons died on the way to the hospital.
Emperor vs Mushnooru Suryanarayana Murthy
In this case, the accused, Mushnooru
Suryanarayan Murthy had an intention to kill
Appala Narasimhulu. This was so that he could
obtain the sums insured on her. Without the
knowledge of Appala, he gave some sweet dish
which contained a poison of arsenic and mercury.
Appala Narasimhulu ate a small portion and threw
the rest away. Rajalakshmi, aged 8 was the
accused niece. He ate some sweet dish and also
gave some to the other little child. This was done
without the knowledge of the accused. The
children died. But Appala recovered from the
severe effects of it.
Egg shell Skulled Rule

So according to the eggshell skull rule, the person who hit

the eggshell skulled person will not be just liable for the
little injury but for the death of the person also even
though, it was unforeseeable. The eggshell skull rule says
that the person who hit the eggshell skulled person will be
responsible for the extreme consequences that the person
with the eggshell skull suffered, not just the amount of
harm a normal person would have suffered. The eggshell
skull rule is often also called thin skull rule.
Question

if one person was engaged in murderously beating another

to death and a stranger, without being requested, were to
rush in and add some more blows so that the victim’s death
was more speedily brought about. Is the first person liable?
Question

The defendant threw some stones into a crowd with

an intention to hit someone with it. However, the
stone somehow missed the crowd and instead hit
the window. It was argued that by the ‘Doctrine of
Transferred Malice’, his intention of hitting in the
crowd was transferred and thus he was guilty of
hitting the window. Was he?
Brainstorm Question

A pushes B from the building. C shoots from his

window in the air where he accidently shoots B. B
dies. Is A Liable?