Intently - Direct and Oblique Intent

Direct and Oblique Intent

Direct intent: a person has direct intent when they intend a particular consequence of their act.

Oblique intent: a person has oblique intent when the event is a natural consequence of a voluntary act and they foresee it as such. The 'natural consequence' definition was replaced in R v Woollin with the 'virtually certain' test. A person is now held to intend a consequence (obliquely) when that consequence is a virtually certain consequence of their action, and they knew it to be a virtually certain consequence. The first leg of this test has been condemned as unnecessary: a person should be held as intending a consequence if (s)he believed it to be a virtually certain consequence, regardless of whether it was in fact virtually certain.

This has two applications:

1. When a person is planning to achieve a given consequence, there may be several intermediate steps that have to be taken before the full result as desired is achieved. It is not open to the accused to pick and choose which of these steps are or are not intended. The accused is taken to intend to accomplish all outcomes necessary to fulfill the overall plan. For example, if A wishes to claim on B's life insurance policy, and so shoots at B who is sitting in a bus, the bullet may have to pass through a window. Thus, even though A may not have desired B's death, it was an inevitable precondition to a claim. Similarly, he may never consciously have considered the damage to the window, but both the murder and the damage under the Criminal Damage Act 1971 are intended. This is distinguishing between the direct intention, which is the main aim of the plan—and the oblique intention, which covers all intermediate steps. More generally, someone directly intends a consequence when their purpose or aim is to cause it, even though they believe the likelihood of success is remote. In R v Dadson, for example, the defendant shot at a man he wrongly believed was out of range. In R v Mohan (1975) 2 All ER 193, the court held that direct intention means, "aim or purpose"—"a decision to bring about, insofar as it lies within the accused's power, the commission of the offence..no matter whether the accused desired that consequence of his act or not."
2. Sometimes, by accident, a plan miscarries and the accused achieves one or more unintended consequence. In this situation, the accused is taken to have intended all of the additional consequences that flow naturally from the original plan. This is tested as matters of causation and concurrence, i.e. whether the given consequences were reasonably foreseeable, there is no novus actus interveniens and the relevant mens rea elements were formed before all of the actus reus components were completed.