Drug Induced Homicide Defense Toolkit
3. Intervening cause limitation Under traditional criminal law causation principles, the intervening cause rule provides an important limit on the scope of criminal liability. Under this principle, if an independent act intervenes between the defendant’s conduct and the result, it can break the causal chain and defeat proximate cause.78 A leading treatise on causation explained the idea this way: “[t]he free, deliberate, and informed intervention of a second person, who intends to exploit the situation created by the first, but is not acting in concert with him, is normally held to relieve the first actor of criminal responsibility.”79 Based on this principle, courts have held outside of the DIH context that “the causal link between [a defendant’s] conduct and the victim’s death [is] severed when the victim exercised his own free will.”80 Applying this rule to drug-induced death prosecutions would have the potential to significantly limit their reach since one could plausibly describe most drug users themselves as intervening actors. Few drug users are pressured by the distributor to use drugs; they make the choice to obtain and use the drug themselves. Indeed, the user often
78
See Hart & Honoré, Causation in the Law at 326.
79
Hart & Honoré, Causation in the Law at 326.
80
E.g., Lewis v. Alabama, 474 So.2d 766, 771 (Ala. Ct. Crim. App. 1985).
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