Non-Fatal Offences Against the Person

Sir William Blackstone 編輯


s.18 OAPA	Wounding with intent to cause GBH/causing GBH with intent
s.18 OAPA	Life imprisionment
s.20 OAPA	Maliciously wounding/inflicting GBH
s.20 OAPA	5 years
s.47 OAPA	Assault occasioning actual bodily harm
s.47 OAPA	5 years/6 months
Common Law	Battery; 6 months/fine
Common Law	Common assault; 6 months/fine

Assault and Battery: 2 separate common law offences

Battery shall be charged as "assault by beating"

Two separate offences often used interchangeably

Need to distinguish

An act which causes another person to apprehend the infliction of immediate, unlawful force on his person. (Collins v Wilcock [1984])

The act can be:

Indirect (e.g. threaten with dog)
Words can be sufficient (spoken or written)
Omission (no case law but seems likely)
Conditional
- Not if threats excludes imminent possibility
- Test
  - Will violence follow unless V takes action (e.g. hands over money)
  - If yes: imminent threat

The victim must apprehend

No need for physical contact
Test is effect on V (approach from behind/sleeping V would not qualify)
No need for V to be afraid of D
Was D’s behaviour a factual and legal cause of V’s apprehension of immediate force?
- Subjective: what did V believe? (e.g. did not know gun was fake)
- PLUS
- Objective: based on facts as V saw them, is that an apprehension of imminent violence?

Immediate: without pause or delay
Courts have widened
- Imminent: V thinks about to happen or threatening to happen
Silence could be an assault (Ireland and Burstow [1997])
- The silent caller intends by his silence to cause fear
  - He is so understood
- V is assailed by uncertainty about his intentions
  - Fear may dominate her emotions
  - It may be the fear that the caller’s arrival at her door may be imminent.
Constanza (1997)
- 20-month campaign of harassment by D against V including threatening letters leading to clinical depression.
- V was caused to apprehend violence ‘at some point not excluding the immediate future’

Intention or reckless as to causing apprehension of immediate, unlawful, personal force

V had a ground floor flat
- D seen looking through window at V
  - V frightened
    - D intended
D argued
- V did not know what D was going to do next
Judge
- No need for a finding that what she was frightened of
  - Which she probably could not analyse at that moment
- Some innominate terror of some potential violence
It was clearly a situation where
- The basis of fear was unknown what D was going to do
  - But whatever he might be going to do next
    - Sufficiently immediately for the purposes of the offence was sth of violent nature

Any conduct by which D intentionally/recklessly inflicts unlawful personal violence on V (Rolfe)

Any intentional/reckless touching of another person
- without the consent of said person
- without lawful excuse
- need not be hostile, rude or aggressive
Not necessarily violence
- More to do with the right to privacy/bodily autonoy
- Invasion of another's right not to be touched or violated
Common law: Collins v Wilcock