Looking at the offences of Assault, Battery, Actual bodily harm and Grievous really serious bodily harm.

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Christopher Wylie         Non-fatal Offences         Access to Law

For this assignment I will be looking at the offences of Assault, Battery, Actual bodily harm and Grievous ‘really serious’ bodily harm.

Common assault and a Battery are under S39 of the criminal justice act and are only classed as summary offences. If a defendant commits one or both of these offences then he/she will be liable for a fine or can be given a custodial sentence for up to six months.

For the actus reus of assault it must be recognized that there was an act, that caused a person to fear, that immediate unlawful force is about to be used against them. For assault there doesn’t even need to be any applied force, all that’s needed is fear that they were going to be attacked. The fear could be simply raising your hand or running towards someone and this would, in law, constitute the actus reus of assault. To commit an assault all that is needed are words and this can be seen in the case of Constanza (1997). In this case the defendant had written 800 letters and made numerous phone calls to the victim. The House of Lords stated that silent phone calls can amount to an assault and this can be seen in the cases of R v. Ireland and Burstow. Usually it must be made certain that the victim feared an immediate infliction of force at that moment. A key example of this is in the case of Smith v. Chief Superintendent, Woking police station (1983). In this case, the defendant was standing inside the victim garden staring her through a window; although the victim was safely locked inside she still feared an instant danger of force. It was said by the court of appeal that:

 “It was clearly a situation where the basis of the fear which was instilled in her, was that she did not know what the defendant was going to do next. But that, whatever he might be going to do next, and sufficiently immediately for the purposes of the offence was something of a violent nature. In effect, it was wholly open to the justices to infer that her state of mind was not only that of terror, which they did find, but some terror of some immediate violence“

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If the victim doesn’t fear immediate unlawful force, then it can’t amount to an assault. It was argued in Venna (1975) that common assault should be a specific intent crime. The mens rea of assault is either intention or subjective recklessness; this will suffice for the mens rea of assault. The defendant must have realised the victim would fear the immediate and unlawful force.

The defence of Battery is defined under S.39 along with assault; this is the next most serious offence. The actus reus of a Battery is the use of unlawful force against another ...

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