As I discussed in Cribbin, supra, where the jury is faced with a charge of murder and is satisfied that the

accused intended to kill or intended to cause bodily harm that he knew was likely to cause death and

was reckless as to whether death occurred, it will rarely be necessary for the trial judge to charge the

jury on the standard of causation. In such a case, the mens rea requirement generally resolves any

concerns about causation.

79 Nor does this case present an illustration of the operation of the thin-skull rule in the

criminal context. The thin-skull rule, which is a long-standing principle of tort law, provides that a

wrongdoer must take his victim as he finds him: Dulieu v. White, [1901] 2 K.B. 669; Athey v. Leonati,

[1996] 3 S.C.R. 458. Thus, the fact that a victim’s head injuries are aggravated beyond what would

normally be expected because of the victim’s unusually thin skull does not relieve a tortfeasor of liability

for the full extent of the harm that resulted from his wrongdoing. That principle applies equally in the

criminal context and is reflected, in part, in ss. 222(5)(d) and 226 of the Criminal Code. As expressed by

McLachlin J., as she then was, in Creighton, supra, at --R. v. Nette, [2001] 3 S.C.R. 488, 2001 SCC 78

R V DALLOWAY (1847) 2 COX 273

A defendant is not criminally liable for a death which was not caused by a culpable act. In this case, the

culpable act was the failure to hold the reigns, but this did not cause the child’s death.

in our case as the culpable act of sending the alcohol was indeed the cause of death as the combined

intake of the alochol and medication significantly increased the chanes of death therefore the act was
the cause of the harm

r v hayward (1908) 21 cox 692 thin skull rule

R V MARJORAM (1999) forseability