Criminal Negligence Causing Death Or Bodily Harm

Welcome back to our YouTube channel. And thank you for joining me today. I want to talk about a bit more obscure topic under the Criminal Code. It’s an interesting topic or rare type charge but it’s criminal negligence causing death or bodily harm. So first of all, what is the definition of criminal negligence? It’s a very high degree of moral blaming, blame worthiness to be criminally negligence. So first of all, is it’s a person doing something or failing to do something that they have a legal duty that is a law, legally duty to do, showing a wanton or reckless disregard for the lives and safety of other people, resulting of course that death or bodily harm. So let’s break that down. Let’s do it by some examples. And I think it’ll become clear to you with examples. So let’s take driving for example. You know, under driving, there’s different levels of negligence, careless, driving, under the Highway Traffic Act. Momentary inattention, you know, you’re looking down at your phone for a few seconds and hit someone. You know, that’s careless driving, driving without doing care of attention. Dangerous driving involves, that’s the next level up, a marked departure from what a normal person would do so for example, speeding at very high levels or weaving in enough traffic for an extended period of time is dangerous driving. Now, criminal negligence there’s a higher moral blame that we’re this and that this is where it’s a marked and substantial departure from the norm. For example, let me give you an example. Let’s say a person is street racing for an extended period of time. Obviously, that person is not , has wanton and reckless disregard for the lives and safety for other people as a street racer. They either know about that risk or don’t care about the rest company that adverted to it, and then putting the lives and safety of people obviously in danger. So let’s say they kill or cause bodily harm to someone. That’s they’ve met the test, if it can be proven by the court beyond a reasonable doubt. So there’s one example. Let me give another sample. Let’s say you’re a caregiver, a parent. And you know, you have a duty to look after your child, that’s legal duty, that’s different statutes and obviously at common law, and so you run very hot bathwater, you hired full, full steam hot that was water and you’ve got your two- or three-year-old there, outside the bath and you intentionally leave the bathroom and just let the water keep running. Well, you’ve shown that’s a high moral blameworthiness. under that situation, you’re showing a wanton or reckless disregard for the life of your child who could easily scald themselves and be charged you can be charged criminally because of bodily harm. You averted to the rest of the left, etc. Another example might be where you kind of, you know, hot summer day, you intentionally I’m going to go into the store and just leave my kid in there in the car, and you stay in the store for an hour you come out the child is either dead or serious heat exhaustion. There’s another example where you could be charged, you are showing a wanton and reckless disregard. Let’s take an example of a landlord who’s knows about a carbon monoxide problem is developing in one of his apartment buildings and does nothing about it, and people die and he’s been told that there’s problem developing and needs to be fixed, don’t worry about it too much money, etc, etc. There’s yet another example of a very important one which occurs more often in Canada occasionally and occasion, unfortunately, had never occurred is you know, let’s say a parent’s failing to provide the necessities of life to a child. They’ve got a child; they’re not feeding the child and that child dies. They can be charged with criminal negligence, obviously they showed wanton and reckless regard, they fail to do their duty, or for that particular child. So there’s, there’s a few examples of it. You know, I can think of other examples, but I think this gets in your mind what it is, it’s a very high level of moral blameworthiness. Now what’s the sentencing for this? So criminal negligence causing bodily harm has a maximum sentence of 10 years and criminal negligence causing death has a maximum sentence of life in prison. So it really depends on the level of bodily harm. I mean, you know, let’s think about things for a second, let’s say, criminal negligence is a minor amount of bodily harm and results in a broken leg. You got no prior record. I mean, you might get away with two months in jail just as an example. But, but let’s take a more extreme example the street racer, who’s charged with impaired driving, for example, criminal negligence, causing death impaired driving, causing death. I mean, they were driving crazy through the streets and speeding. I mean, the senses are increasing. They’re getting much higher. I mean, I think that person could face eight years, nine years in prison. Maybe more than that, but, you know, the sentences are escalating, but they’re not as high as people think they should be. For more serious cases of criminal negligence causing bodily harm leaving a child in the car intentionally, and that child probably recovers, but they are brain damage. You could face years in jail for that. So there’s a few examples or the landlord, that’s a pretty serious example, the landlord who knew about the danger of carbon monoxide poisoning and didn’t do anything about it people die again, multi years in jail. Even though the maximum penalties are life in prison any there’s never there’s never I don’t think there’s any sentences over 10,12 years currently, for those that criminal negligence causing death, per se in Canada, that I’m aware of. So you know, it’s a, it’s a nebulous concept. You kind of know it when you see it, don’t you, like you know, a street racer showing reckless disregard, there’s a lot of tests that gets very complicated. I won’t get into tests but there’s a modified objective standard that has to be applied to all these tests in courts as a lawyer you got to know this stuff, but I try to distill it down to its component parts. We knew what we see and I gave several examples and it’s, certainly, sentences are increasing but they’re not quite as long as many people. Thank you for watching our video, we are absolutely committed to bringing you the best possible criminal and DUI educational videos. 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