Gray v Thames Trains & Ors

Facts

Gray was a passenger in a train involved in the Ladbroke Grove rail crash in 1999, for which the defendant, Thames Trains, accepted responsibility. He developed post-traumatic stress disorder. In 2000 he killed a man by stabbing him, and was convicted of manslaughter on the ground of diminished responsibility, being made subject to a hospital order with restrictions. He sued Thames Trains for damages including the disorder itself, loss of earnings after the killing, damages for his detention and its effects, and compensation for feelings of guilt and damage to reputation caused by the manslaughter.

History

The courts below held that Gray could not recover damages for the consequences of the manslaughter and the resulting detention, and he appealed to the House of Lords.

Issue

Whether the principle that a person may not profit from his own wrong, or the rule of public policy against recovering damages for the consequences of one's own criminal act, barred recovery of losses suffered after and because of the killing, even though the defendant's negligence had caused the disorder which led to the killing.

Held

Appeal dismissed. The claimant could recover for the disorder but not for the loss of earnings, the effects of detention, or the feelings of guilt and shame flowing from the manslaughter.

Ratio

• A claimant cannot recover damages for loss which is the consequence of a sentence imposed on him for a criminal act, nor for loss which results from his own criminal act in a case where he is personally responsible for it, since the law must not allow its own punishments to be undermined.
• The fact that the defendant's negligence caused a condition which led to the claimant's criminal act does not prevent the application of the rule, where the claimant is held criminally responsible, even in a reduced degree.

The judgments

Key reasoning

• The civil law should not compensate a claimant for being punished by the criminal law, because to do so would be inconsistent with the criminal courts' judgment that he is responsible.
• The wider rule applies where the loss arises from the claimant's own crime, and an answer based on the defendant's earlier negligence being a cause of the crime is excluded by the requirement of public policy.
• Damages for the disorder itself, up to the time of the killing, were not tainted by the later crime and remained recoverable.

Where it fits in the module

On the FHS illegality topic, the case fixes the rule for claims in which the claimant's criminal act intervenes between the defendant's wrong and the loss claimed. The analysis was reconsidered in Patel v Mirza [2016] UKSC 42, which adopted a policy-based approach to illegality in the law of unjust enrichment, and in Henderson v Dorset Healthcare University NHS Foundation Trust [2020] UKSC 43, where the Supreme Court applied the ex turpi causa rule to a claimant who killed while suffering a mental illness. A tutorial question is whether Gray represents a defensible refusal to let tort undermine the criminal law or an overbroad rule that deprives claimants of compensation for illness the defendant caused.

Criticisms

• The rule applies where the claimant was only partly responsible because of mental disorder, though that disorder was in part the product of the defendant's negligence, which is hard to reconcile with ordinary principles of causation.
• The two rules proposed by Lord Hoffmann are difficult to separate and define, which makes the application of the narrow and wide rules uncertain.
• Denying compensation produces a windfall for the negligent defendant, whose wrong was a real cause of the later harm.
• The reasoning is based on consistency between the civil and criminal law, but a finding of diminished responsibility reflects the criminal law's recognition of impaired capacity, which sits uneasily with imposing the whole loss on the claimant.