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Necessity

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NECESSITY LAW
THE GENERAL RULE
Necessity arises where a defendant is forced by circumstances to transgress the criminal law. The generally accepted position is that necessity cannot be a defence to a criminal charge. The leading case is: * R v Dudley and Stephens (1884) 14 QBD 273. The defendants and a cabin boy were cast adrift in a boat following a shipwreck. The defendants agreed that as the cabin boy was already weak, and looked likely to die soon, they would kill him and eat him for as long as they could, in the hope that they would be rescued before they themselves died of starvation. A few days after the killing they were rescued and then charged with murder. The judges of the Queen's Bench Division held that the defendants were guilty of murder in killing the cabin boy and stated that their obvious necessity was no defence. The defendants were sentenced to death, but this was commuted to six months' imprisonment. * Lord Coleridge CJ, having referred to Sir Matthew Hale's assertion (The History of the Pleas of the Crown, 1736) that a man was not to be acquitted of theft of food on account of his extreme hunger, doubted that the defence of necessity could ever be extended to a defendant who killed another to save his own life. After referring to the Christian aspect of actually giving up one's own life to save others, rather than taking another's life to save one's own, he referred to the impossibility of choosing between the value of one person's life and another's: * "Who is to be the judge of this sort of necessity? By what measure is the comparative value of lives to be measured? Is it to be strength, or intellect, or what? It is plain that the principle leaves to him who is to profit by it to determine the necessity which will justify him in deliberately taking another's life to save his own. In [the present case] the weakest, the youngest,

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