Actus Reus and Omissions: every key term you need (+ practice quiz)
25 flashcard terms for Criminal Law Topic 2, written to match the course framework. Study them here, then drill them as interactive flashcards, or test yourself with the 15-question quiz — free, no account needed.
The conduct element of an offense: a voluntary act or a qualifying omission, together with any required attendant circumstances and result specified by the definition of the crime.
Voluntary act requirement
Criminal liability must rest on conduct that includes at least one willed bodily movement; a person may not be convicted solely for thoughts, status, or wholly involuntary motion.
Involuntary bodily movement
Motion produced by reflex, convulsion, sleep, unconsciousness, hypnosis, or other causes not the product of the actor's effort or determination, and therefore not a basis for liability.
Martin v. State
An intoxicated man carried by police onto a highway could not be convicted of public drunkenness because the state, not the defendant, supplied the element of appearing in public.
People v. Decina
A driver who knew he suffered seizures was liable for deaths caused during a seizure because the voluntary act was driving while aware of the risk of losing consciousness.
Time framing of the voluntary act
Courts may locate the required willed act earlier in the sequence, such as taking the wheel or failing to take medication, rather than at the moment control was lost.
Habitual and automatic conduct
Acts performed without conscious deliberation, such as routine driving movements, still count as voluntary because they are the product of the actor's effort even if unreflective.
Status crimes
Offenses that punish a condition rather than conduct; Robinson v. California held that criminalizing the status of narcotics addiction is cruel and unusual punishment.
Robinson v. California
A statute making it an offense to be addicted to narcotics was struck down because it punished a disease-like condition without requiring any act within the jurisdiction.
Powell v. Texas
A conviction for public intoxication was upheld because the statute punished the act of appearing drunk in public rather than the bare status of being an alcoholic.
Omission liability
Failing to act is criminal only where the law imposes a duty to act, the defendant could physically have acted, and the defendant knew the facts giving rise to the duty.
Statutory duty to act
Legislation may create affirmative duties, such as filing tax returns, reporting child abuse, or remaining at the scene of an accident, whose breach is itself an offense.
Status relationship duty
Certain relationships, notably parent to minor child and spouse to spouse, generate a legal duty of care whose breach can support homicide liability by omission.
Contractual duty to act
A person who has undertaken by contract to care for another, such as a nurse or lifeguard, may be criminally liable for failing to perform the promised protective role.
Voluntary assumption of care
One who begins to rescue or shelter a helpless person and thereby secludes the victim from other aid assumes a duty to continue reasonable assistance.
Creation of peril
A defendant whose own conduct places another in danger, even innocently, has a duty to take reasonable steps to avert the resulting harm.
People v. Beardsley
A man was held to owe no legal duty to the woman who overdosed in his room because she was neither his spouse nor otherwise within a recognized duty relationship.
Barber v. Superior Court
Withdrawing life support from a permanently comatose patient was treated as an omission rather than an act, and no duty required continued futile treatment.
Jones v. United States
The court identified the recognized bases of omission liability and reversed because the jury was never instructed to find that a legal duty existed.
Possession as an act
The Model Penal Code treats possession as sufficient conduct when the possessor knowingly obtained the thing or knew of the possession long enough to be able to end it.
Constructive possession
Control over contraband without physical custody, shown by dominion over the place or person where the item is found, which can satisfy the conduct element.
Attendant circumstance
A fact that must exist when the conduct occurs for the offense to be complete, such as the dwelling of another in burglary or the age of the victim in statutory offenses.
Result element
A consequence that the statute requires the conduct to produce, such as death in homicide, which brings causation questions into the case.
Social harm
The negation or endangerment of an interest the criminal law protects, expressed through the elements the legislature selected to define the offense.
Concurrence of elements
The requirement that the culpable mental state actuate the conduct constituting the offense, so a later formed intent cannot retroactively make an earlier act criminal.