Critically assess the mens rea requirements for the offence of Murder

It is a key principle of the criminal law that you have the intention, or mens rea, for the offence you are charged with; I would submit that for murder only an intention to kill should suffice. The mens rea for murder is wider than that and following Cunningham covers an intention to kill, cause GBH or having an oblique intention to either and I submit this is too broad a spectrum for what is regarded as one of the most heinous crimes in English law.
In Howe Lord Hailsham said murder is “often described as one of the utmost heinousness, is not in fact necessarily so” and he refers to the broad spectrum of conduct that can give rise to a murder charge; from a brutal offence such as in Thabo Meli where the defendants beat the victim over the head and threw his body off a cliff, to a mercy killing as in Inglis where the victim in a vegetative state was killed by his mother who believed he was in pain and suffering. Though both cases had the same outcome, the intentional death of the victim, the levels of blameworthiness are nowhere near parallel and yet both were convicted of the same offence of murder. Whilst these cases only refer to direct intention, oblique intention raises other issues as discussed by J Rogers in ‘Criminal Intent’ who says “Indirect intention works best when it captures terrorists and arsonists who wantonly create grave risks to life. But in other respects it widens the scope of intention undesirably in a way which might cause us to rely on common law defences.”. The offence of murder covers a wide number of situations and levels of intention and is regarded as heinous in the public eye and also in the application of the criminal law with the only sentence available being mandatory life. Yet not all defendant’s that are charged with murder have behaved in a heinous and utterly blameworthy fashion and the breadth of mens rea sufficient leaves us with the situation identified by Lord Brown in Rahman that “There are many more murderers under our law than there are people who have killed intentionally”. For an offence of such gravity it seems wrong to apply it to such a broad spectrum of offences particularly when the sentence is so restrictive and the social consequences of being branded a murderer so severe