Automatism Through Intoxication

Automatism through intoxication
The Court of Appeal in Quick held that automatism arising from intoxication
does not fall within the definition of insanity. However, this does not mean
that a person who causes harm whilst in such an intoxicated state as to
have significantly reduced consciousness or to be unable to control
movements of the body should be brought within the doctrine of
automatism. If the cause of the involuntariness is intoxication, then the
courts treat the case as falling within the ambit of the intoxication doctrine.
It is rare for the evidence to be strong enough to raise a reasonable doubt
that D was sufficiently intoxicated as to be in a state of automatism, but
this seems to have been accepted in Lipman (1970),43 where D had
taken drugs and believed that he was fighting off snakes and descending
to the centre of the earth, whereas he was actually suffocating his
girlfriend. A defence of automatism was refused, and the case was treated
as one of intoxication,44 drawing on the doctrine of prior fault discussed in
(e). The distinction may seem a complication too far, but consider this
example. An air traffic controller goes on duty whilst heavily intoxicated.
She is
so intoxicated that she collapses unconscious when performing a vital
part of her work, endangering many lives. If she is charged with an
endangerment offence of some kind, there seems to be no pressing
reason to grant the defendant an automatism-based defence. However, it
should arguably be different if her intoxication led her accidentally to fall,
hit her head hard, enter a mental state akin to sleepwalking in
consequence, and then collapse at work as just described. In the latter
case, the causal influence of the intoxication is just the background in
which another cause of automatism—the concussion—governs her
behaviour.
Prior fault
The aim of the doctrine of prior fault46 is to prevent D taking advantage of

a condition if it arose through D's own fault. In relation to automatism, the
point was first made in Quick (1973),47 where Lawton LJ held that there
could be no acquittal on this ground if the condition ‘could have been
reasonably foreseen as a result of either doing or omitting to do
something, as, for example, taking alcohol against medical advice after
using certain prescribed drugs, or failing to take regular meals whilst
taking insulin’. According to this view, the question of prior fault is
resolved by applying the test of reasonable foreseeability, the test of the
reasonably prudent person in D's position. But in Bailey (1983)48 the
Court of Appeal held that a person should not be liable to conviction if the
condition of automatism arose through a simple failure to appreciate the
consequences of not taking sufficient food after a dose of insulin, even if
the reasonably prudent person would have realized it. The defence of
automatism should be available unless it can be shown that D knew that
his acts or omissions were likely ‘to make him aggressive, unpredictable
and uncontrolled with the result that he may cause some injury to others’.
The conflict between the doctrine of prior fault and the principle of
contemporaneity of conduct and fault is discussed elsewhere.50 The
question here is whether the doctrine should apply at all in automatism
cases. Consider the approach of trying to avoid the conflict with the
contemporaneity principle by convicting D in respect of conduct at an
earlier point in time, when there was fault. In Kay v Butterworth (1945)51 D
fell asleep while driving home from
night-work, and his car collided with soldiers marching down the road. It
was held that he could be convicted of careless driving—not in respect of
the collision (when he was asleep and therefore (p. 94) involuntarily
omitting to exercise due care), but in respect of his earlier failure to stop
driving when he felt drowsy. Even on its own terms, this approach is
possible only where the offence is of a continuing nature, and where the
charge can be appropriately worded. Having said that, one advantage of
this approach is that it recognizes that the driving was at one stage
involuntary, and that involuntary movements cannot be the subject of
criminal liability. The application of prior fault in cases such as Quick fails
to take this point, in the sense that criminal liability still depends on, or is
traced through, the involuntary movements.52 Only if one maintains that
the doctrine of prior fault is so fundamental to our notions of responsibility
that it trumps ordinary causal principles, as well as the principle of
contemporaneity, can the law's position be rationalized.
Reform
The proposition that people should not be held liable for conduct that is
involuntary is fundamental, and the common law on automatism has
developed from it. However, even accepting that cases of prior fault should
continue to be excluded from automatism and that cases resulting from
intoxication should be classified under the intoxication rules, one major
unsatisfactory feature of the law on automatism is the line drawn between
this doctrine and the defence of insanity. Since the courts have flexible
powers of disposal under the 1991 Act, it may be argued that judicial
persistence with the internal/external distinction does not have drastic
implications for defendants. Nonetheless, there can be no sense in
classifying hypoglycaemic states as automatism and hyperglycaemic
states as insanity, when both states are so closely associated with such a
common condition as diabetes. The difference in burdens of proof
(prosecution must disprove automatism, defence must prove insanity)
compounds the anomaly. The proper boundaries of the defence of
insanity will be examined further in Chapter 5.2(c), but it is apparent from
the discussion here that the present scope of the phrase ‘disease of the
mind’ is too wide. On the one hand, there are many states in which the
functioning of the mind is affected but which should not sensibly be
included within the concept of insanity. On the other hand, it is difficult to
arrive at a clear definition of automatism: the Draft Code refers to ‘impaired
consciousness … depriving him of effective control of the act’.

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Automatism through intoxication

The aim of the doctrine of prior fault46 is to prevent D taking advantage of

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