R. V. Dudley and Stephens

R. V. Dudley And Stephens

R v Dudley and Stephens (1884) 14 QBD 273 DC is a leading English criminal case which established a precedent, throughout the common law world, that necessity is not a defence to a charge of murder. It concerned survival cannibalism following a shipwreck and its purported justification on the basis of a Custom of the Sea. It marked the culmination of a long history of attempts by the law, in the face of public opinion sympathetic to castaways, to outlaw the custom and it became something of a cause célèbre in Victorian Britain.