✪✪✪✪✪ http://www.theaudiopedia.com ✪✪✪✪✪ What is CRIMINAL NEGLIGENCE? What does CRIMINAL NEGLIGENCE mean? CRIMINAL NEGLIGENCE meaning - CRIMINAL NEGLIGENCE definition - CRIMINAL NEGLIGENCE explanation. Source: Wikipedia.org article, adapted under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/ license. SUBSCRIBE to our Google Earth flights channel - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC6UuCPh7GrXznZi0Hz2YQnQ In criminal law, criminal negligence is a surrogate mens rea (Latin for "guilty mind") required to constitute a conventional as opposed to strict liability offense. It is not, strictly speaking, a mens rea because it refers to an objective standard of behaviour expected of the defendant and does not refer to his mental state. To constitute a crime, there must be an actus reus (Latin for "guilty act") accompanied by the mens rea. Negligence shows the least level of culpability, intention being the most serious, and recklessness being of intermediate seriousness, overlapping with gross negligence. The distinction between recklessness and criminal negligence lies in the presence or absence of foresight as to the prohibited consequences. Recklessness is usually described as a 'malfeasance' where the defendant knowingly exposes another to the risk of injury. The fault lies in being willing to run the risk. But criminal negligence is a 'misfeasance or 'nonfeasance' (see omission), where the fault lies in the failure to foresee and so allow otherwise avoidable dangers to manifest. In some cases this failure can rise to the level of willful blindness where the individual intentionally avoids adverting to the reality of a situation. (In the United States, there may sometimes be a slightly different interpretation for willful blindness.) The degree of culpability is determined by applying a reasonable person standard. Criminal negligence becomes "gross" when the failure to foresee involves a "wanton disregard for human life" (see the discussion in corporate manslaughter). The test of any mens rea element is always based on an assessment of whether the accused had foresight of the prohibited consequences and desired to cause those consequences to occur. The three types of test are: 1. subjective where the court attempts to establish what the accused was actually thinking at the time the actus reus was caused; 2. objective where the court imputes mens rea elements on the basis that a reasonable person with the same general knowledge and abilities as the accused would have had those elements; or 3. hybrid, i.e., the test is both subjective and objective. The most culpable mens rea elements will have both foresight and desire on a subjective basis. Negligence arises when, on a subjective test, an accused has not actually foreseen the potentially adverse consequences to the planned actions, and has gone ahead, exposing a particular individual or unknown victim to the risk of suffering injury or loss. The accused is a social danger because he or she has endangered the safety of others in circumstances where the reasonable person would have foreseen the injury and taken preventive measures. Hence, the test is hybrid. Reasonable person standard: This is not a real person but a legal fiction, an objective yardstick against which to measure the culpability of real people. For these purposes, the reasonable person is not an average person: this is not a democratic measure. To determine the appropriate level of responsibility, the test of reasonableness has to be directly relevant to the activities being undertaken by the accused. What the ‘average person’ thinks or might do would be irrelevant in a case where a doctor is accused of wrongfully killing a patient during treatment. Hence, there is a baseline of minimum competence that all are expected to aspire to. This reasonable person is appropriately informed, capable, aware of the law, and fair-minded. This standard can never go down, but it can go up to match the training and abilities of the particular accused. In testing whether the particular doctor has misdiagnosed a patient so incompetently that it amounts to a crime, the standard must be that of the reasonable doctor.....

• published: 30 Aug 2017
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