Court of Appeal (Criminal Division) · Judgment of the court given by Geoffrey Lane LJ
Facts
The appellant, having failed to make a call from a public telephone box, lost his temper and slammed the handset down onto its cradle, breaking it. He was charged with criminal damage under s 1(1) of the Criminal Damage Act 1971. His case was that, in his anger, it had not occurred to him that he might damage the telephone.
History
He was convicted after the trial judge directed the jury on the meaning of reckless; he appealed against the direction.
Issue
What does reckless mean in s 1(1) of the Criminal Damage Act 1971, and can a defendant who did not consciously advert to an obvious risk of damage nonetheless be reckless?
Held
Appeal dismissed; conviction upheld.
Ratio
- A person is reckless as to damage if he knows that there is some risk of damage resulting from his act, or if, the risk being obvious to him as a man of ordinary faculties, he deliberately closes his mind to it; such a defendant cannot escape liability by saying that the risk did not cross his mind.
The judgments
Geoffrey Lane LJ (lead)
Gave the judgment of the court. Accepted that recklessness under the 1971 Act is concerned with the defendant's own state of mind, but held that a man of ordinary intelligence who slams down a telephone in temper must know, in the back of his mind, that damage may result, and that deliberately shutting out that knowledge is recklessness. The direction was therefore not a misdirection in substance.
Key reasoning
- Recklessness in the 1971 Act was understood in the subjective sense associated with R v Cunningham [1957] 2 QB 396: the defendant must be aware of the risk.
- Awareness can be present even where the defendant, through anger or indifference, refuses to attend to what he knows; knowledge suppressed in that way is still knowledge.
- On the facts, the risk of damage from slamming down the handset with force was so obvious that a jury could only conclude that the appellant knew of it and shut it out of his mind.
Where it fits in the module
In the basic principles topic, Parker sits at the centre of the debate about subjective and objective fault. It shows the courts trying to keep a subjective test while catching the bad-tempered or indifferent defendant, a move later developed in R v Stephenson [1979] QB 695 and then overtaken by Caldwell. Read with R v G, it raises the question whether the closed-mind defendant is genuinely aware of the risk or is being blamed for a failure to think, and so whether the line between subjectivism and objectivism is as clean as R v G suggests.
Criticisms
- The concept of deliberately closing one's mind to a risk is unstable: a defendant can only close his mind to what he has perceived, so either he was aware (ordinary subjective recklessness) or he was not (and the test becomes objective in disguise).
- Inferring awareness from obviousness to a man of ordinary faculties invites juries to convict on what the defendant ought to have realised, eroding the protection the subjective test is meant to give, especially for those whose faculties are not ordinary.
- Treating anger as no answer may be sound as a matter of blame, but it suggests the real ground of liability is a culpable attitude of indifference rather than foresight, which the court did not openly acknowledge.
Written with AI (claude-opus-5.5 (Claude Code writer)) on 1 November 2026, reviewed for errors by a second model (claude-sonnet-5.5 (Claude Code checker)). Read the case itself at [1977] 2 All ER 37, [1977] Crim. L.R. 102. Spotted an error? Tell us.