This article argues that we should rethink homeless people’s punishments for violating quality-of-life ordinances. Those ordinances prohibit acts that are deemed to constitute urban nuisances—urban camping, public urination, and sleeping on sidewalks among them. Violating quality-of-life ordinances can result in expensive fines, administrative fees, and civil consequences for unpaid fines. In line with other scholars’ work, this article demonstrates how our current punishment scheme entrenches individuals in homelessness and operates like a self-fulfilling prophecy. Lacking a private property right and stuck in a cycle of homelessness, homeless people will continue to alleviate their needs on public property and be subject to further coercion and punishment. Homeless people’s punishments for violating quality-of-life offenses are also objectionable because they violate three types of proportionality constraints: the gravity of the prohibited conduct, the homeless person’s moral blameworthiness, and their personal situation. This article proposes an alternate punishment scheme that minimizes the prospect of entrenchment in homelessness and remedies those three proportionality concerns. It argues that the state should adopt a day-fine model for financial penalties, implement criminal justice debt absolution frameworks, and rethink the civil and criminal consequences associated with unpaid fines. A more proportional punishment scheme is neither a solution to the reality of homelessness nor a substitute for the state’s responsibility to ensure better access to housing. However, this article’s proposals can mitigate the gravest consequences associated with homeless people’s punishments, prevent entrenchment in homelessness, and ensure homeless people are treated with greater respect.
Over the past two decades, the Supreme Court of Canada has developed an overarching account of causation rooted in the need to prevent the conviction of the morally innocent. Despite these valuable contributions, there are certain limitations to the way causation is currently conceptualized in Canadian criminal law. This article aims to address those limitations and offer a plausible alternative account of causation and its underlying rationale. It advances three core arguments. First, it explains why judges should employ one uniform formulation of the factual causation standard: significant contributing cause. Second, it offers a new account of legal causation that distinguishes foreseeability as part of the actus reus from foreseeability inherent to mens rea. In doing so, it sets out why legal causation is primarily concerned with fairly ascribing ambits of risk to individuals. Third, it refutes the Supreme Court of Canada’s underlying justification for the causation requirement. Contrary to the Court’s invocation of the importance of moral innocence, this article demonstrates that causation principles actually tend to concede the accused’s moral fault while still providing reasons for withholding blame for a given consequence. This reveals that causation’s underlying rationale is more closely related to concerns about fair attribution rather than moral innocence. Ultimately, this article reframes causation to better answer one of the most basic questions in the criminal law: Why am I being blamed for this?
Oftentimes, a criminal action resulting in the victim’s death is clearly attributable to the accused. In many cases, we can easily say that the accused “caused” the victim’s death. Causation, however, becomes particularly complicated when some type of intervening act occurs between the accused’s initial conduct and the victim’s death, creating speculation about whether it is fair to morally blame the accused for the ensuing result. The Supreme Court of Canada’s relatively recent decision R v Maybin marks a significant attempt to clarify notions related to causation in the criminal law. Although the Court refused to alter conventional principles related to the law of causation, or create a new test to verify when it has been established, it provided two analytical tools which can be used in order to see when it is fair to morally blame the accused for the victim’s death despite an intervening act’s occurrence. As will be seen, although these analytical tools of “reasonable foreseeability” and “independent acts” serve to simplify the law of causation, there are important problems with how each tool has been conceptualized. This article highlights these important shortfalls, and ultimately, questions to what extent these developments in the law of causation affect current conceptions of mens rea.Souvent, une action criminelle entraînant la mort de la victime est clairement imputable à l’accusé. Dans de nombreux cas, il est facile de conclure que l’accusé a « causé » la mort de la victime. Toutefois, le lien de causalité devient particulièrement complexe lorsqu’un acte intermédiaire se produit entre la conduite initiale de l’accusé et la mort de la victime, ce qui crée des conjectures à savoir s’il est juste de blâmer moralement l’accusé pour le résultat qui a suivi. La Cour suprême du Canada, dans sa décision relativement récente dans l’affaire R v Maybin, tente de clarifier les notions liées à la causalité en droit pénal. Bien que la Cour ait refusé de modifier les principes classiques liés au lien de causalité, ou de créer un nouveau test afin de répertorier les situations dans lesquelles il peut être établi, la Cour a fourni deux outils analytiques qui peuvent être utilisés afin de déterminer quand il est juste de blâmer moralement l’accusé pour la mort de la victime, malgré l’occurrence d’un acte intermédiaire. Comme on le verra, même si ces outils d’analyse de la « prévisibilité raisonnable » et des « actes indépendants » servent à simplifier la théorie de la causalité, la manière dont ces outils ont été conçus pose de sérieux problèmes. Cet article met en lumière ces lacunes importantes, et ultimement, questionne dans quelle mesure ces développements de la théorie de la causalité ont une incidence sur les conceptions contemporaines de la mens rea
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