Causation In South African Criminal Law
1 Introduction
Causation as an element of a crime can be considered difficult to prove in certain circumstances. This is due to the fact that both factual and legal causation must be proven in order to hold somebody liable for their actions. In certain cases, an exception is made due to the fact that medical negligence acts as a novus actus interveniens and, therefore, the accused cannot be held liable for the death of their victims.
In R v Mabole, Judge Young made the statement that if medical treatment is given with “goodwill” and “reasonable efficiency” then the accused in the criminal case cannot comment on the errors that the doctors made when treating the patient. In short, Judge Young meant that an accused cannot rely on medical
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To go about answering this question I made use of the opinions of various legal academics as well as relevant, South African, case law.
2 Causation in South African criminal law
Causation forms part of one of the five elements of a crime when determining if the accused is guilty or not. It entails the court asking if the accused’s conduct caused the unlawful consequence. It is only relevant for consequence crimes, such as murder or arson, and there must be a causal link between the conduct of the accused and the unlawful consequence. In order to determine if there is a link, the court makes use of two tests: factual and legal causation.
2 1 Factual causation
Factual causation links the conduct of the accused to the end result of the unlawful consequence. For factual causation, we use the conditio sine qua non test which translates to the “but for” test and is used in practice as “but for the accused’s conduct, would the victim have suffered the same
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Burchell is of the belief that where there is negligent medical treatment, there is novus actus interveniens. Snyman has an opposing view on medical negligence. He believes that negligent medical treatment should not break the chain of causation and only if it is gross negligent medical treatment can it act as a novus actus
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