Case information

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Criminal law - Offences - Manslaughter - Causation - Whether the independent acts of the third party, in striking the unconscious victim following the assault by the appellants, breached the chain of causation relieving the appellants of liability for manslaughter - If those acts did not breach the chain of causation, whether the actions of that third party were reasonably foreseeable.

The appellants and the victim were involved in an altercation at a bar. It is alleged that one of the appellants punched the victim in the head until he fell face down on a pool table while the other appellant assisted him. While the victim lay unconscious on a pool table, the bar’s doorman approached him and punched him in the head. The doorman, assisted by some other doormen, then carried the victim outside and left him on his back on the walkway in front of the bar. At trial, the appellants were acquitted of manslaughter. While the trial judge found that they and the doorman had, independently, committed separate assaults causing bodily harm, he was unable to determine whether any or all of them had caused the death of the victim. The trial judge acquitted the appellants of manslaughter, and of assault causing bodily harm on the basis that it was not open to him to convict them of that offence given the wording of the indictment. The Crown appealed the manslaughter acquittals, alleging that the trial judge erred in his causation analysis. The majority of the Court of Appeal allowed the appeal and ordered a new trial. Finch C.J., dissenting, would have dismissed the appeal. In his view, the doorman’s intentional conduct in striking the unconscious victim constituted an intervening act by an independent third party, and that the appellants should not be held morally or legally responsible for his act, in the absence of a conclusion that their blows, in conjunction with his, were the cause of death. Furthermore, Finch C.J. found that no reasonable person could have foreseen the doorman’s conduct in the circumstances, and that no reasonable trier of fact, acting judicially, could have reached such a conclusion on the evidence.