R v Bainbridge

Facts

The defendant bought oxygen cutting equipment, which was later used by others in breaking into a bank and stealing from it. The equipment was found at the scene after the break-in. The defendant accepted that he suspected the equipment would be put to some illegal use but denied that he knew it was to be used to break into premises.

History

The defendant was convicted at trial as an accessory before the fact to the breaking and entering and the theft. He appealed to the Court of Criminal Appeal on the ground that the jury had been wrongly directed on the knowledge required.

Issue

How much must an accessory before the fact know about the crime intended by the principals, in particular whether it is enough to know that some illegal act is intended or whether he must know the particular crime.

Held

Appeal dismissed; the conviction was upheld.

Ratio

• An accessory need not know the particular crime to be committed, nor its precise time and place; it is enough that he knows the type of offence the principals intend to commit with his help.
• Mere suspicion, or knowledge that some illegal venture of an unspecified kind is intended, is not enough; the accessory must know that the principals intend to commit an offence of the kind that was in fact committed.
• The jury were properly directed to ask whether the defendant knew that the equipment was to be used for breaking and entering premises, as opposed to merely knowing that it would be used for some illegal purpose.

The judgments

Key reasoning

• To require knowledge of the precise crime, date and place would make accessorial liability too narrow and let the supplier of the tools of crime escape on a technicality.
• To allow liability on knowledge that some illegal act was planned would be too wide, because an accessory should only be answerable for crimes of a kind he has agreed to help bring about.
• The jury had been directed with the right level of specificity, and the evidence entitled them to find that the defendant knew the equipment was to be used to break into premises.

Where it fits in the module

Topic 6 on complicity asks what a secondary party must know and intend about the crime of the principal. Bainbridge is the classic statement that the fault element is knowledge of the essential type of crime, and it forms the base from which the later debates about intention, foresight and the scope of a joint enterprise are developed.

Criticisms

• The concept of a type of crime is vague, so it is unclear whether supplying equipment for one kind of acquisitive crime makes the supplier liable for a different one.
• The requirement of knowledge rather than suspicion can allow a supplier who consciously ignores obvious signs of crime to escape, since willful blindness is not clearly equated with knowledge.
• The approach differs in structure from the later foresight based tests for parasitic accessory liability, leaving the relationship between knowledge of the type of crime and foresight of a further crime unclear.