CRIM 2652 Lecture Notes - Lecture 7: Procedural Justice, Reasonable Person, Actus Reus
16 Aug 2016
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Rule of law: everyone is subject to the law. ^-historically, mercy was applied strategically to help legitimate the system in its basic form. The system needs to apply principles of mercyespecially, when someone is guilty of committing a crime. What one finds in the administration of justice is the operation of certain principles to try to account for those rare circumstances when people have to do bad things for good reasons. The law struggles very hard with establishing the boundaries around when it"s permissible for someone to commit a bad act. The question in criminal law is: what is necessary to find criminal liability. A crime: contravention of some piece of legislation and its sanctionit is a bad act that is determined to be bad by the elements of the behaviour. Anything that qualifies as a crime requires elements: actus reus: guilty act, mens rea: guilty mind. Specific elements of every criminal act is defined by law.
