What is Diminished Responsibility and Loss of Control?

Diminished Responsibility and Loss of Control are both partial defences to murder (sometimes referred to as voluntary manslaughter). Diminished Responsibility is codified under S.52 of the Coroners and Justice Act 2009 (replacing Diminished Responsibility under the Homicide Act 1957). In short, Diminished Responsibility requires the following criteria to be met; the defendant must be suffering from an abnormality of mental functioning, which provides an explanation for the defendant’s acts or omissions in being party to the killing, which arose from a recognised medical condition and substantially impaired the defendant’s ability to understand the nature of the defendant’s conduct, to form a rational judgement and to exercise self-control. The key cases to note here are; R v Ahluwalia (1993), R v Dowds (2012), R v Byrne (1960), R v Miller (1972), R v Campbell (1997), R v Wood (2009), R v Dietschmann (2013), R v Erskine (2009), R v Martin (2002.)Loss of Control is codified under S.54 of the Coroners and Justice Act 2009 (abolishing the common law defence of provocation). In short, Loss of Control requires the following criteria to be met; the defendant’s acts and omissions in doing or being party to the killing resulted from the defendant’s loss of control, the loss of self-control had a qualifying trigger (fear of serious violence from the victim OR things said or done that gave the defendant a justifiable sense of being seriously wronged) and whether a person of the defendant’s sex and age, with a normal degree of tolerance and self-restraint and in the circumstances of the defendant might have acted in the same way. There are limitations on the qualifying triggers, S.55(6)(b) prohibits inciting the violence and S.55(6)(a) prohibits things said or done which constitute sexual infidelity (although the case of R v Clinton (2012) established that sexual infidelity can be considered alongside the existence of a legitimate qualifying trigger). The key cases to note here are; R v Clinton (2012), DPP v Camplin (1978), R v Morhall (1995), Attorney General for Jersey and Holley (2005), R v Doughty (1986), R v Hatter (2013), R v Bowyer (2013), R v Johnson (1989).