Medical or Managerial Manslaughter?

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1 University Press Scholarship Online You are looking at 1-10 of 32 items for: keywords : manslaughter Medical or Managerial Manslaughter? Neil Allen in The Criminal Justice System and Health Care Published in print: 2007 Published Online: January 2009 ISBN: eisbn: acprof:oso/ This chapter explores the possibility of prosecuting N.H.S. Trust and Foundation Trust hospitals for gross negligence manslaughter. In 1990, Parliament removed the immunity from prosecution of hospital Trusts, declaring them to be corporate bodies. It is arguable that the objective nature of gross negligence manslaughter no longer requires the Crown to adduce evidence of a defendant's guilty state of mind as a prerequisite to a conviction. The author contends that the troublesome principle of identification is not applicable to the sui generis nature of hospital Trusts because they owe a direct duty of care to patients. The author considers the potential impact of the Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Bill Whilst human errors are inevitable, a hospital's inadequate resilience to risk should not be. The author argues that it is systemic failures that should be targeted rather the individuals who do their best to shield patients from them. Pointless and Preventable : An Overview of Religion-Based Medical Neglect of Children acprof:oso/ This chapter provides an overview of religion-based medical neglect of children, in which devout parents forego providing adequate medical care to their ailing sons and daughters because the doctrines of their religious faiths prohibit it. It outlines the pervasiveness of the Page 1 of 6

2 phenomenon among members of particular Christian churches (including Christian Science) in the United States, describing in general terms how, since the late 19th century, it has resulted in numerous deaths and injuries to children. The chapter then details how these injuries have generated tangled legal conflicts implicating such issues as religious liberty and children's rights when prosecutors have filed criminal charges against parents who have chosen faith-healing practices over medicine. The chapter pays particular attention to how murky manslaughter and child neglect statutes have complicated such legal cases. Defended by Lord Jehovah : The Peculiar People in the British Courts acprof:oso/ This chapter analyzes a series of influential (but heretofore largely unexamined) manslaughter and neglect cases involving a British spiritual healing sect known as the Peculiar People, whose adherents rejected conventional medicine and treated their children solely with prayer. As recounted here, throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries, prosecutors responded to deaths of children in the sect by charging Peculiar People with manslaughter and neglect. Over time, the British courts developed a relatively consistent approach to these cases, generally rejecting claims that the religious liberty of parents would be violated if they were prosecuted for faith-based medical neglect. In addition to tracing the evolution of the British approach to such cases and its profound effect on the American courts in the early 20th century, this chapter details both the sincerity and the intransigence of spiritual healers. The Pain Has No Right to Exist : Contemporary Christian Scientists in the Courts acprof:oso/ Page 2 of 6

3 The sociolegal issues raised by more contemporary prosecutions of Christian Scientists for neglect and manslaughter compose the bulk of this chapter. These cases pitted grieving parents who sincerely believed in the efficacy of spiritual healing against equally genuine prosecutors who insisted that those parents neglect had resulted in the senseless deaths of children. The litigation resulting from the death of Ian Lundman in 1989 provides a particularly revealing jumping-off point because it gave rise to two separate legal actions: a criminal prosecution of his mother (in whose care he died), and an unprecedented wrongful death civil action filed by his father against his mother and the mother church of Christian Science in Boston. This chapter uses these cases to underscore the difficulties posed to prosecutions by state laws that often were interpreted as providing exemptions to manslaughter and child neglect laws to parents who practice spiritual healing. We Need to Change the Statute : The Promise (and Limits) of Statutory Reform acprof:oso/ This chapter entails a discussion of how lawmakers in several states including Colorado, Massachusetts, and Oregon have reacted to prominent cases of religion-based medical neglect by attempting to clarify and strengthen state manslaughter and child neglect laws. The stories of these reform efforts demonstrate how the issue of faith-based medical neglect has generated spirited public policy debates over the parameters of the state's power to regulate religious practice and its obligation to safeguard the rights of children. The chapter also tackles questions that haunt even the staunchest advocates for reform: will bolstering temporal laws really alter the behavior of deeply religious parents who trust in the efficacy of spiritual healing? Or, given the intensity of spiritual healers beliefs, will the welfare of their children remain in jeopardy whenever a serious illness strikes? Also included is a detailed examination of the prosecution of Ray Hemphill, a Wisconsin minister who faced criminal charges after he led an exorcism ceremony in which a toddler died. Page 3 of 6

4 Rethinking English Homicide Law Andrew Ashworth and Barry Mitchell (eds) Published in print: 2000 Published Online: March 2012 ISBN: eisbn: Item type: book acprof:oso/ The law of homicide is probably the most high-profile area of the criminal law, and yet in recent years it has been relatively neglected by lawreform agencies. This book brings together six English criminal lawyers to discuss the future shape of the English law of homicide, and deals with such important topics as the definition of murder, the relevance of mental-abnormality provocation, unintentional killings, defences, and sentencing. It also considers broad policy choices and matters of detail in their contemporary social and legal contexts, and highlights the difficult issues that need to be tackled if we are to have an up-to-date law for murder and manslaughter. Introduction Jeremy Horder in Provocation and Responsibility Published in print: 1992 Published Online: March 2012 ISBN: eisbn: acprof:oso/ This book is about moral and legal responsibility for provoked retaliation. It focuses on the historical and philosophical underpinnings of the legal doctrine of provocation. In English law, that doctrine has the effect of reducing criminal liability for a killing to manslaughter for what would otherwise be murder. The book aims to form historical insights and philosophical analysis into what one might call the story of the doctrine of provocation. It examines how provocation emerged as a partial defence to murder, how the legal understanding of the nature of action in anger appeared radically to change during the doctrine s history, and how the doctrine s mitigating effect has been explained and justified. Introduction Andrew Ashworth and Barry Mitchell in Rethinking English Homicide Law Published in print: 2000 Published Online: March 2012 ISBN: eisbn: acprof:oso/ Page 4 of 6

5 The creation of a law regarding homicide has long been shaped by public opinion and the different viewpoints of scholars and members of the academe. Homicide as a neutral meaning is challenged by an ever-increasing awareness of the factors leading up to the act of manslaughter itself, culminating in the distinction between voluntary and involuntary manslaughter. But even this modern definition is blurred by ever more discerning factors, dutifully outlined in the following essays that give an insight and background to the need for rethinking and recreating the law of homicide. This chapter serves to give a broad definition of the topics to be discussed in the succeeding chapters, discussing topics such as the distinction between murder and homicide, and provocation. The Criminal Justice System and Health Care Charles A. Erin and Suzanne Ost (eds) Published in print: 2007 Published Online: January 2009 ISBN: eisbn: Item type: book acprof:oso/ This book analyses how the criminal justice system regulates health care practice, and to what extent it can and should be used as a tool to resolve ethical conflict in health care. For most of the 20th century, the criminal courts were engaged in matters relating to medicine principally as a forum to resolve ethical controversies over the sanctity of life. However, the judiciary approached this function with reluctance, and a marked tendency to defer to the medical profession to define what constituted ethical, and thus lawful conduct. Over the past 25 years, the criminal law has increasingly been drawn into the fray, becoming a major actor in the resolution of ethical conflict. The trend to prosecute for aberrant professional conduct or medical malpractice and the role of the criminal process in medicine has been analytically neglected in the UK. There is scant literature addressing the appropriate boundaries of the criminal process in resolving ethical conflict, the theoretical legal analysis of the law's relationship with health care, or the practical impact of the criminal justice system on professionals and the delivery of health care in the UK. This volume addresses these issues via a combination of theoretical analyses and key case studies, drawing on the experiences of other carefully selected jurisdictions. It places a particular emphasis on the appropriateness of the involvement of the criminal justice system in health care, the limitations of this developing trend, and solutions to the problems it throws up. Page 5 of 6

6 Mistake Fiona Leverick in Killing in Self-Defence Published in print: 2006 Published Online: January 2009 ISBN: eisbn: acprof:oso/ This chapter examines the issue of how the accused who makes a mistake in self-defence should be dealt with in law. Two types of mistake are analysed: mistake about the existence of an imminent attack and mistake about the amount of force needed to repeal that attack. The approaches taken to the issue of mistake in self-defence in the major common law jurisdictions are outlined. It is argued that only reasonable mistakes about either the existence of an attack or the amount of force necessary to repel an attack should be able to ground a complete acquittal on the basis of self-defence. It is proposed, though, that an unreasonable mistake in relation to either of these elements might function as a partial defence, reducing a charge of murder to one of manslaughter or culpable homicide. Page 6 of 6