R v Martin

Facts

As an audience was leaving a theatre, the defendant extinguished the lights on a staircase and placed an iron bar across the doorway. A panic followed in which several people were crushed and seriously hurt.

History

He was convicted at trial of inflicting grievous bodily harm under s 20 of the Offences against the Person Act 1861, and the question whether the conviction could stand was reserved for the Court for Crown Cases Reserved.

Issue

Whether the offence of unlawfully and maliciously inflicting grievous bodily harm can be committed without any assault or application of force to the victim by the defendant.

Held

Conviction affirmed. Harm may be inflicted on a person where the defendant by a deliberate unlawful act causes it as a natural consequence, even without a direct assault or touching.

Ratio

• Infliction of grievous bodily harm under s 20 of the 1861 Act does not require an assault or the direct application of force; it is enough that the defendant by a wilful and unlawful act brought about the harm as a natural consequence of what he did.

Key reasoning

• The statutory words are unlawfully and maliciously inflicting, and nothing in them confines the offence to cases of direct violence.
• The defendant acted deliberately in creating a situation of darkness and obstruction, and the panic and injuries were the natural and foreseeable result of that act.
• That the injuries were caused through the reaction of third persons rather than by his own hands did not break the connection with his act.

Where it fits in the module

Topic 3 on non-fatal offences against the person turns on the structure and wording of the 1861 Act, including the difference between inflict and cause. The case is an early indication that inflict does not require battery or assault, which later courts developed in Wilson [1984] AC 242 and in Burstow [1998] AC 147, where psychiatric injury caused by silent telephone calls was held to be harm inflicted. It sits against the approach in R v Clarence (1888) 22 QBD 23, which was decided later and took a narrower view.

Criticisms

• The reasoning gives no clear boundary for inflict, leaving open how far indirect causation can go before the word stops being apt.
• By treating a panic caused by a defendant as the infliction of harm on those hurt, the decision stretches a provision drafted for violent attacks to cover conduct more naturally described as causing harm.
• The outcome blurs the distinction between the offences in ss 18 and 20 and the scheme of the 1861 Act, in which a lesser offence of assault is a separate and lower category.