Voluntary Withdrawal in the Context of Attempt – A Defence?

Obiter ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 42 (1) ◽  
pp. 148-161
Author(s):  
Shannon Hoctor

Once a crime has been committed, full repentance and restoration do not have any bearing on liability, but may be taken into account in mitigation of sentence. On the other hand, there is no question of criminal liability ensuing for an attempt at a crime if there is a withdrawal from the envisaged crime while still in the stage of preparation, and before, in South African law, reaching the watershed moment of the “commencement of the consummation”. However, what occurs between the moment when the attempt begins, and the moment when the crime has been completed, where there has been a withdrawal from the criminal purpose, is more contested terrain. The disagreement does not apparently arise in the South African case law, where the few judgments that refer to this question have consistently held that where the accused withdraws after the commencement of the consummation of the crime, there will be attempt liability and, at best, the accused may rely on the abandonment as a mitigating factor in sentencing. However, as is discussed, prominent South African academic commentators, along with comparative sources in both the civil-law and common-law jurisdictions, demur from such an “unyielding analysis”, and would regard such withdrawal as giving rise to a defence to criminal liability. Which approach ought to be applied in South African law?  The question may be posed as to how to categorise a defence of voluntary withdrawal? It is neither a justification ground nor a ground excluding fault, but rather a ground excluding punishment. The uniqueness of the defence is demonstrated in that the accused has already met all the requirements for liability, and thus it is not an intending criminal, but an actual criminal who is being considered. This is at least true of the common-law approach (also adopted by South African law), where a two-stage approach is applied to the trial, relating first to establishing criminal liability and followed, if guilt is so established, by an inquiry into sentence. At the outset, it may be stated that the view that is taken in the discussion that follows is that there is no good reason to treat voluntary abandonment as a special defence. As Yaffe has stated, to grant a defence on the basis of abandonment is to mistake the absence of a reason to issue a particular sanction rather than a lower one for a sufficient reason to issue no sanction at all.In the discussion that follows, the current case law is examined, whereafter the alternative approach contended for by some academic writers (and used in other jurisdictions) is discussed; the arguments for and against a renunciation defence are set out, before these aspects are drawn together in a final concluding analysis.

Obiter ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Marita Carnelley ◽  
Shannon Hoctor

In 2008, the authors’ note on advanced age as a mitigating factor in the South African criminal courts set out the Roman-Dutch history and the South African case law with regard to this issue. Brief reference was made to the position of the elderly offender in the Zimbabwean, English and Australian jurisdictions. The aim of this note is not to repeat what was said before, but to provide a wider perspective on the pertinent issues relating to sentencing the elderly (a contested term, but for present purposes referring to offenders over the age of 60), especially the concept of mercy. It should be reiterated that old age does not exclude criminal liability, but it can serve as one of many mitigating factors during sentencing although it is not a bar to imprisonment. The case of S v Phillips is no exception. The structure of this note is the following: it commences with a discussion of the Phillips judgment and to place it within a general problematic sentencing framework vis-a-vis the elderly. The concept of mercy is then examined in light of recent Commonwealth jurisprudence; whereafter parallels are drawn between the sentencing of a battered wife and the sentencing of a battered geriatric. The note concludes with a brief mention of the post-sentencing options available to an offender in the form of mercy and  as well as parole. 


1972 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 87-119 ◽  
Author(s):  
P. R. Glazebrook

The sharp contrast between the vast number of detailed statutory provisions defining particular offences and the small handful of widely phrased provisions concerned with the general principles of criminal liability is, perhaps, the most striking feature of English criminal law, and, like the continued co-existence of both common law and statutory offences, one of the unhappy consequences of England's failure to enact a penal code. Among the few statutory provisions laying down general principles of liability or excuse there is none which comprehends a defence of necessity, and so commentators have inevitably looked to the case law for an answer to the question: Is there in English criminal law a defence of necessity? by which they have meant: Is there a defence of necessity in the sense in which there is a defence of, for instance, insanity, or infancy, or duress or prevention of crime? To the question understood in that sense, the answer returned must, it is thought, be a plain No. To ask and to answer the question in that sense may, however, be misleading: it may be more revealing (as this paper suggests) to ask, How does English law handle the plea of necessity when it arises? What, in other words, is the juristic technique employed?


2010 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. 6
Author(s):  
A Nienaber

The article examines the legal requirements relating to the informed consent of mentally ill persons to participation in clinical research in South Africa. First, the juridical basis of informed consent in South African law is outlined; and second, the requirements for lawful consent developed in South African common law and case law are presented. Finally, the article deliberates upon the requirements for the participation of mentally ill persons in research as laid down by the Mental Health Care Act and its regulations, the National Health Act and its (draft) regulations, and the South African Constitution.


2018 ◽  
Vol 32 (1&2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Chuks Okpaluba

In order to accomplish its objectives of extensively regulating rights and obligations, the 1996 Constitution of South Africa similarly provides for the enforcement of those rights by the courts. In turn, it has, in the said enforcement provisions, invested in the courts enormous discretionary powers to enable them to effectively deal with breaches of the entrenched fundamental rights as well as all constitutional rights violations. That the Constitutional Court has purposefully interpreted and made optimum use of the expressions: ‘appropriate relief’ and ‘just and equitable’ order in developing the constitutional remedies jurisprudence is crystal clear from a wealth of available case law. It is also not in doubt that the contributions of Justice Ngcobo (later Chief Justice) in this regard are intellectually gratifying. This presentation singles out for discussion and analysis the judgment of Ngcobo J in Hoffman v South African Airways 2001 (1) SA 1 (CC) which not only typifies judicial activism at its acme; it has also introduced into the South African public and labour laws, the novel remedy of ‘instatement.’ Apparently drawn from the analogy of the labour law remedy of reinstatement, ‘instatement’ is akin to the remedy of mandamus in public law, and specific performance in the law of contract. This article moves from the premise that this innovation is one of its kind in contemporary common law jurisprudence and one which courts in the common law jurisdictions world would no doubt emulate one fine day.


Teisė ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 79 ◽  
pp. 76-91
Author(s):  
Agnė Jakaitė

Straipsnyje analizuojama šiuo laikotarpiu aktuali sąžiningumo imperatyvo, kaip neteisėtų veiksmų nustatymo ikisutartiniuose santykiuose, taikymo problematika Lietuvos civilinės teisės ir lyginamų skirtingų jurisdikcijų kontekste. Įvertinusi šiandienes Lietuvos praktikos realijas, straipsnio autorė atskleidžia ikisutartinio sąžiningumo turinį, daug dėmesio skirdama dviejų elementų – draudimo vesti derybas neturint tikslo sudaryti sutartį ir reikalavimo nenutraukti toli pažengusių derybų be pakankamos priežasties – analizei. Kadangi Lietuvos doktrinoje šie klausimai plačiau nenagrinėti, temos analizei ir formuojamoms išvadoms pagrįsti remiamasi užsienio autorių darbais bei kitų valstybių suformuota ilgalaike teismų praktika.The author examines the imperative of good faith as the concept determining the illegal actions during the pre-contractual phase in the content of Lithuanian civil law and different continental and common law legal systems. In the view of nowadays Lithuanian realities the article defines the content of pre-contractual good faith and focuses on the analysis of two elements – the prohibition to negotiate without no real intention to conclude a contract and the requirement not to breach off the negotiations without the reasonable cause when one of the parties has a good reason to believe that the contract will be concluded. Since these issues have not been dealt before in Lithuanian doctrine, the research refers to the foreign legal articles and case law.


Author(s):  
Justin Leach

To inform those unfamiliar to the subject, private international law is simply that branch of a country’s domestic law, which regulates the relationship between private individuals when foreign legal rules are in some way concerned. This branch generally has three subbranches: Jurisdiction (choice of court), choice of law and recognition of foreign judgments. The discipline of characterisation forms part of the choice of law sub-branch and is explained further below. This article discusses the problem of a ‘gap’ arising from the phenomenon of characterisation in South African private international law, by considering the current case law authorities on the matter as well as the criticisms (and suggested solutions) of legal academics. A general discussion of characterisation, with some alternative suggestions for dealing with the problem, is also mooted for consideration in a bid to air ideas. No short work could do justice to the problem visited here. This work seeks to show that the obsession with characterisation in the choice of law arena is perhaps ill founded and should perhaps be simplified in favour of a ‘most natural results’ approach.


2010 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-40
Author(s):  
Mamoun Abu-Zeitoun ◽  
Mouaid Al-Qudah

This article is a comparative study of withdrawal as a defence to the criminal liability of an offender in Jordan (a civil law jurisdiction) and Australia (a common law jurisdiction). The analysis in this paper reveals that, in both jurisdictions, criminal laws have long accepted withdrawal as a conduit through which the offender’s liability can be modified or completely quashed. However, there has been no serious attempt, at least in Jordan, to provide anything approaching a complete explanation of the conditions under which the defence may be available and to explore its limits and boundaries. Neither has any serious effort been made to offer an account of the defence’s conceptual nature and governing rationale. The present paper seeks to identify and explore the defence’s conceptual basis and rationale, its current state of law and the appropriate direction in which the defence might be developed. To achieve this purpose, the paper is divided into three sections. In Section 1, it explores the conceptual nature of withdrawal. Section 2 addresses the rationale of the defence in light of the underlying principles of criminal liability in both jurisdictions. In Section 3 a comparative analysis of the defence’s qualifying requirements is undertaken in relation to both primary and accessorial criminal liability. Comparative analysis shows that withdrawal can be used as a defence to all forms of criminal complicity with differing degrees of variations in relation to both its qualifying requirements and the extent to which it may affect the liability of an offender. In cases involving incitement, however, the inciter cannot rely on the defence to avoid criminal liability although his or her punishment can be reduced pursuant to his or her voluntary withdrawal under the JPC.


Author(s):  
Charnelle Van der Bijl

This contribution examines parental criminal responsibility for the delinquent acts of their children.  As South African law has been swayed by legal philosophy of Anglo-American jurisprudence, a comparative analysis is undertaken with the United States of America, where this issue has been addressed legislatively in both civil tort law and criminal law. The reasoning behind the implementation of specific legislation in the United States is that the common law principles are rooted on the principles of individualisation, which does not specifically cater for parental liability.  Parental responsibility laws have been challenged constitutionally over the years in the United States. Critics are of the view that such laws interfere with the rights of parents to raise their children and are a form of cruel punishment. Additional criticism raised is that parental responsibility laws impose strict liability on parents. Furthermore, some misgivings have been shed that many parents face challenges of being single parents or poverty, which will be exacerbated with the imposition of fines or imprisonment for the misconduct of their children. Despite these concerns and criticism, it will be shown that these laws have withstood the challenges over many decades, in the United States, in both the fields of the law of tort and criminal law. The common law of tort provides for the liability of parents for the conduct of their child. However, such conduct must be specifically attributable to a parent’s action or inaction. The purpose behind tort parental responsibility legislation focuses not only on providing monetary compensation by parents where their children are unable to do so, but also aims to encourage parents to provide better supervision of their children.  At the opposite end of the spectrum, the focus of statutory criminalisation tends to remain on criminal liability of parents for failing to protect others from their child, due to a failure in supervision and to prevent juvenile delinquency.  The South African law of delict is briefly contiguously considered in the context of parental responsibility laws. The concept of parental criminal responsibility laws under South African law is then considered and proffered as a useful mechanism to regulate misconduct of children currently falling outside the aegis of the criminal law.


Author(s):  
Andrzej Malinowski

The article presents an attempt at an alternative approach to the scholarly interpretation model, in which statements expressed in the language of norms have been replaced by statements in the language of lawyers. In the proposed approach, the result of the interpretation of a legal text is a set of sentences of the lawyers’ language stating that a specific general legal norm applies at the moment of interpretation due to the validity of the relevant fragment of the legal text. The whole (complete) set of statements in the lawyers’ language whereby legal norms are held to be valid is treated by lawyers as a description of the legal system. It is stated that, considering the law as a system, neither case law nor scholarship in practice refers to the language of norms, but to the results of interpretations described in the lawyers’ language. However, the paradigm of scholarly interpretation using the concept of the language of norms has its undoubted cognitive value and is useful for didactic purposes.


2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Mahdis Riahy ◽  
Mahdi Esmaeile

Nowadays, mental disorders are some of the most common diseases in our societies. In most cases mentally disordered people will be having problems with the environment which they live, people around them and even themselves; with the probability of causing damage. The question is does the mentally disordered individual counts responsible for the consequences of his actions or not? If yes, then what type of liability is on his burden and who is responsible for redressing the damages? In any case, which a person is forced to redress another individuals damage he has civil liability against the injured party. Civil liability is a rational and jurisprudential principle, and also a legal maxim that guaranties remedies for faults of individuals inside a contract or any damages done by the acts of individuals outside of a contract. Considering the legal protection Provided for the incapacitated; liability of incapacitated individuals is an important subject of civil and criminal law. Since the sinister intention is essential for criminal liability; the minor and the insane do not have any criminal liability but insanity and minority are not among the disclaimers of civil liability. In some legal systems such as “Common Law” Civil liability of the incapacitated individuals and their wardens is under the rule of general civil liability regulation. However, in Iran I.R. liability of the incapacitated is clearly recognized by the article “1216” of Iranian Civil Code. In respect of the above, we will be researching about the psychotic and mentally ill individuals and their liability in Jurisprudence and Iranian Case Law. Point of this research is to clarify the conditions of the insane and mentally disordered in Iranian Law and the support given to them by the Legislators


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