R v Powell; R v English
Under joint enterprise, a secondary party who foresaw that the principal might kill with intent was guilty of murder, a rule later overruled in R v Jogee.
Facts
In Powell, three men went to buy drugs from a dealer. When the dealer came to the door, one of the men shot him dead. The two secondary parties knew that the principal was armed with a gun, and were convicted of murder. In English, two young men attacked a police officer with wooden posts. The other man then stabbed the officer to death with a knife, which English said he did not know his co-defendant was carrying. English was convicted of murder.
Legal principle
The House of Lords upheld the convictions in Powell but quashed English's conviction. Lord Hutton said that it was sufficient for a secondary party to be guilty of murder that he realised that the principal might kill or cause grievous bodily harm with intent. However, where the principal used a weapon that was fundamentally different from anything the secondary party foresaw, such as a knife rather than a wooden post, the secondary party was not guilty. In R v Jogee [2016] UKSC 8, the Supreme Court held that the courts had taken a wrong turn, and that foresight is only evidence from which intention to assist or encourage may be inferred.
Related cases on inchoate offences and accessorial liability
- Attorney General's Reference (No 1 of 1975) [1975] QB 773
- Attorney General's Reference (No 1 of 1992) [1993] 1 WLR 274
- DPP for Northern Ireland v Maxwell [1978] 1 WLR 1350
- Haughton v Smith [1975] AC 476
- National Coal Board v Gamble [1959] 1 QB 11
- R v Anderson [1986] AC 27
- R v Bainbridge [1960] 1 QB 129
- R v Becerra and Cooper (1975) 62 Cr App R 212
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