Regina v. Dudley and Stephens

14 QBD 273, DC (1884)

ELI5:

Sections

Rule of Law:

Necessity is not a defense to a charge of murder; the law does not permit a person to kill an innocent and unoffending individual to save their own life, even under extreme duress such as starvation.

Facts:

Dudley, Stephens, Brooks, and a 17-year-old boy named Parker were crew members of a yacht cast away in a storm on the high seas, 1600 miles from land.
The four were compelled to survive in an open boat with no water and very little food, which ran out completely after the twelfth day.
After being without food for seven days and water for five days, Dudley proposed casting lots to sacrifice one person to save the rest, but Brooks refused.
On the twentieth day, Dudley and Stephens agreed that if no vessel appeared by the next morning, they would kill the boy, Parker, who was lying helpless and weak at the bottom of the boat.
Dudley, with Stephens' assent, slit Parker's throat with a knife; the boy was too weak to resist and did not assent to his death.
The three surviving men fed upon the boy's flesh and blood for four days.
On the fourth day after the killing, a passing vessel rescued the men.
The jury found that if the men had not fed upon the boy's body, they likely would have died of starvation before being rescued.

Procedural Posture:

The Crown indicted Dudley and Stephens for the murder of Richard Parker.
The case was tried at the Devon and Cornwall Winter Assizes before Baron Huddleston and a jury.
The jury returned a 'special verdict,' finding the specific facts of the event but stating they were ignorant of the legal consequences, and referred the question of guilt or innocence to the court.
The case was argued before a Divisional Court of the Queen's Bench Division to determine the legal outcome based on the special verdict.

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Issue:

Does the common law defense of necessity justify the killing of an innocent person when the defendants reasonably believe such killing is the only way to preserve their own lives from starvation?

Opinions:

Majority - Lord Coleridge, C.J.

No. The court held that the extreme necessity of hunger does not justify the killing of an innocent person to save one's own life. Lord Coleridge reasoned that while self-defense is a recognized justification, it applies only to repelling force or violence, not to the taking of an unoffending life. He argued that preserving one's own life is not an absolute duty; often, the higher moral and legal duty is to sacrifice one's life for others, as in the case of soldiers or captains of sinking ships. The court warned that allowing 'necessity' as a defense for murder would be dangerous, as it would leave the determination of whose life is more valuable to the subjective judgment of the individual tempted to commit the crime. The court concluded that while the temptation was terrible, the law must uphold the sanctity of life and cannot lower its standard to accommodate human frailty.

Analysis:

This seminal case draws a definitive line between the defense of self-defense and the defense of necessity. It establishes that while the law acknowledges human instincts for self-preservation, it refuses to sanction a utilitarian calculus where one innocent life can be legally sacrificed to save others. The decision emphasizes that the law serves as a moral standard to which citizens must aspire, even if that standard is incredibly difficult to meet in extreme circumstances. Practically, it closes the door on 'survival homicide' as a legal excuse, leaving mercy to the executive branch (commutation of sentence) rather than the judicial branch.

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