Causation in Criminal Law: every key term you need (+ practice quiz)
25 flashcard terms for Criminal Law Topic 4, 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 factual link between conduct and result, usually established by asking whether the result would have occurred when and as it did but for the defendant's conduct.
But-for test
The standard inquiry for factual causation: strip out the defendant's act and ask whether the forbidden result would still have happened in the same way at the same time.
Substantial factor test
An alternative used when two independently sufficient causes converge, asking whether each defendant's conduct was a substantial contributor to the result.
Concurrent sufficient causes
Two forces each capable of producing the result operate together, so the but-for test would absurdly exonerate both and courts ask instead about substantial contribution.
Acceleration of death
A defendant who hastens the death of a person already dying is an actual cause, because the law measures the result as it occurred rather than as it might eventually have occurred.
Proximate cause in criminal law
A normative limit on liability asking whether the result is sufficiently connected to the defendant's culpable conduct to make punishment just, given intervening events and foreseeability.
Model Penal Code causation provision
Under MPC section 2.03 the result must be a but-for consequence and must not be too remote or accidental in its occurrence to have a just bearing on liability or gravity.
Intervening cause
An event that occurs after the defendant's conduct and contributes to the result; whether it cuts off liability turns on foreseeability and whether it was responsive or coincidental.
Superseding cause
An intervening cause so unforeseeable or independent that it relieves the defendant of responsibility for the ultimate result.
Responsive intervening cause
A reaction to the situation the defendant created, such as flight or emergency medical treatment, which normally does not break the causal chain unless abnormal or bizarre.
Coincidental intervening cause
An event that merely happens to strike because the defendant's conduct placed the victim at a particular place or time, breaking the chain unless the event was foreseeable.
Medical maloccurrence rule
Ordinary negligence by treating physicians is a foreseeable response to the injury and does not relieve the assailant, while grossly abnormal treatment may supersede.
Apparent safety doctrine
Where the victim reaches a position of apparent safety after the defendant's act, later harm is generally attributed to the victim's own choices rather than to the defendant.
Free deliberate informed intervention
A voluntary and fully informed choice by the victim or a third party to run a known risk often severs criminal responsibility for the eventual harm.
Year and a day rule
An old common law limit denying homicide liability if the victim survived beyond a year and a day; most jurisdictions have abolished it as medically obsolete.
Eggshell victim principle
The defendant takes the victim as found, so unusual frailty that magnifies the injury does not break the causal chain or reduce liability for the result.
People v. Acosta
A police helicopter collision during a long car chase was held factually caused by the fleeing driver, but the court examined whether the crash was too remote to be attributed to him.
People v. Arzon
A defendant who set a fire was held responsible for a firefighter's death where an independent second fire combined with his, because the risk to responders was foreseeable.
State v. Rose
Uncertainty about whether the pedestrian died on impact or while being dragged defeated proof of causation for the manslaughter theory the state advanced.
Velazquez v. State
In a drag racing case the surviving racer was not held responsible where the deceased made a free and deliberate choice that directly produced his own death.
Commonwealth v. Root
Pennsylvania rejected tort proximate cause standards for homicide, requiring a more direct causal connection before a drag racer answers for a competitor's death.
Oxendine v. State
A conviction failed where the state could not show that the father's later beating accelerated the child's death rather than merely adding to earlier injuries.
Transferred causation problem
Where the harmful result occurs by an unexpected manner or to an unexpected victim, courts ask whether the divergence is too remote or accidental to matter.
Omission and causation
A failure to act causes a result when performing the omitted duty would probably have prevented the harm, framed as a but-for inquiry into the hypothetical rescue.
Concurrence of cause and culpability
The prosecution must show not only that the defendant caused the result but that the causal path falls within the risk that made the conduct culpable.