Extenuating Circumstances

Extenuating Circumstances. When a crime is committed, those circumstances, in connection either with the position of the prisoner or with the act alone, which are taken into consideration by the court in mitigation of the punishment are popularly called extenuating circumstances. The previous good character of the person convicted may always be proved as a circumstance giving him some claim to leniency of punishment. Besides character, there are other circumstances, the presence of which in a case sometimes serves to mitigate the sentence, sometimes to take the act done out of the category of crime altogether. One is youth. Thus, no act done by any person under seven years of age is a crime. Defective mental power in the person convicted will always be considered in determining the severity of his sentence. Such disease of mind as prevents a man from knowing that the act he does is wrong will excuse him from the consequences of an act otherwise criminal. Thus, if one man kill another under the insane delusion that he is breaking a jar, the act is not a crime. Drunkenness, when voluntary, is not held an extenuating circumstance, but if a man is made drunk by the fraudulent administration of drugs, and while under their influence kills another, not knowing what he does, the act is not a crime. It is a good excuse for persons charged with crime that they have been compelled by others by threats of death or great violence to do the criminal act; and the acts of a married woman in presence of her husband are presumed to be done under his coercion, and so, unless the presumption is rebutted, will be excused. Ignorance of the law is no excuse for an offence. Thus, a foreigner, not knowing the law of England, might kill a man in a duel, and suppose that he had done nothing unlawful. But he would be guilty of murder. Nor, in general, will ignorance of facts be a good excuse, although in particular circumstances it might form a valid defence. Thus, if a man pretended in a joke to be a robber, presented a pistol at the head of a traveller; and demanded his money, and the traveller, believing himself to be attacked by a real robber, shot and killed the pretended robber, his act would be held as justified. Sir James Fitzjames Stephen (Digest of the Criminal Law, 1887) states, in language purposely vague, to represent the vagueness of the law, a principle under which the stress of necessity is held to excuse acts otherwise criminal. He says: 'An act which would otherwise be a crime may in some cases be excused if the person accused can show that it was done only in order to avoid consequences which could not otherwise be avoided, and which, if they had followed, would have inflicted upon him or upon others whom he was bound to protect inevitable and irreparable evil, that no more was done than was reasonably necessary for that purpose, and that the evil inflicted by it was not disproportionate to the evil avoided.' He gives as an illustration of the principle the case of a governor of Madras who acted towards his council in an arbitrary and illegal manner. The council deposed him and put him under arrest, and assumed the powers of government themselves. That was not an offence if the acts done by the council were the only means by which irreparable mischief to the establishment at Madras could be avoided. He also gives as a further illustration the often figured case of the plank. 'A and B, swimming in the sea after a shipwreck, get hold of a plank not large enough to support both; A pushes off B, who is drowned. This is not a crime.' The principle, however, was not held to cover the case of shipwrecked sailors who killed a boy in order to eat his body, without which they would probably not have survived.