Necessity

Necessity 

The well-known case of R v Dudley and Stephens (1884) 14 QBD 273 concerned an act of survival cannibalism following a shipwreck, and examined whether the killing of another for the sake of one's own survival could be acceptable. The court held that necessity cannot be a defence to murder. Nevertheless, some judges and scholars continue to discuss the matter in very rare and highly exceptional cases. In Re A (Children) (Conjoined Twins: Medical Treatment) (No 1) [2001] Fam 147, the English Court of Appeal confirmed that necessity may constitute a defence where three conditions are satisfied concurrently: (1) the act is done to avoid inevitable and irreparable evil; (2) no more is done than is reasonably necessary for the purpose to be achieved; and (3) the evil caused is not disproportionate to the evil avoided. This decision should not, however, be regarded as a precedent of general application. The reason is that the court made clear that the facts of that case were highly unusual—although the surgery would inevitably cause the death of one of the infants, it was the only means by which the other could survive, and without the surgery both would inevitably die—and such an extreme situation of choosing the lesser of two evils is virtually impossible to replicate in reality. A broad interpretation of this decision might open the door to killing in order to preserve oneself, contrary to the principle long established in Dudley and Stephens, namely that the law cannot accept the sacrifice of an innocent person's life in exchange for the survival of another.