Just to waive any responsibility to the Readers – there will be spoilers from Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom. If you have not yet seen the movie – please do and then return to (hopefully) share the below-described concerns.

Dino-facts (spoilers)

Recently I have watched the second installment of a blockbuster Jurassic World – JW: Fallen Kingdom. Contrary to really fun and classic-references one might find in the first movie, the plot of the second one was frankly speaking – ridiculous. See the very apt summary of How It Should Have Ended. What however made it somewhat interesting was the scope of criminal liability of its main characters – Owen Grady and Claire Deary.

Fast-forwarding to… last quarter of so of the movie. The dinosaurs have been hauled to a private mansion of John Hammond’s business associate (somewhere in the continental USA) and being auctioned by the Evil Guys. Of course, everything goes south, and dinosaurs which were not sold are contained in a relatively tight dungeon while toxic gas is filing the premises. Provided that someone opens the main gate and release them outside – they will perish. After heartbreaking deliberations, our heroes – Owen and Claire partake in the release (the Button is however pushed by a 10 or so year old Maisie).

This is when the (criminal) fun begins. Just after few minutes of their freedom carnivory (allosaurus?) immediately eats the Bad Guy. Then they run into the woods. We also see that for sure Blue (velociraptor) and the T-Rex are on the run and reach a populated area. Considering all the movies from the franchise – it may be implied that they will hunt big time.

Criminal liability – causation and mental state

Now to the gist – when they kill someone (like the Bad Guy) while they are in the wild – shall Owen and Claire (we leave aside the 10-year-old) bear criminal liability for those deaths? If so, two issues immediately appear:

• will that be murder (they for sure saw the ultimate probability of those animals being lethal as hell, regardless of what they accepted the risk),
• for how long shall they bear the liability for individual deaths? Unless the carnivores are killed or hunted down – they will continue to hunt themselves. They may appear every like 3 months and hunt a person somewhere in the US.

The dinosaur case however theoretical, it may have a very obvious practical counterpart – when someone releases (intentionally or negligently) a dangerous animal (a tiger or king cobra) in a populated area.

The crime of murder in every legal system is designed in a similar or even identical way and serves one major purpose – to punish people for killing others. Simultaneously it bears another message to the public – “nobody is allowed to kill another person.” What is “killing”? Casing death. How may that be executed? In any conceivable way. The thing is that the norm standing behind the prohibition is worded very broadly in order to accommodate the vast variety of chain of events resulting in death. In this perspective we do not have any hesitation to, at least prima facie, declare releasing an unprecedently lethal animal free in the populated area as one of the potential ways to cause others death. But of course, as every criminal lawyer perfectly is aware of – a chain of events connecting the cause with the result in its pure, empirical or ontological denomination does not satisfy the justice. In such a way 99 % of results could be attributed to an individual (which one, that is a separate question).

Causation

The concept of causation in criminal law introduces a set of positive (must be proven) as well as negative (if proven, negate the causation) prerequisites which have a legal character and thus limit the potentially unlimited scope of result attribution. They have different names in different legal systems, but the positive ones basically may be reduced to those three concepts:

• infringement of a rule or safeguard principle (e.i. don’t use open fire at a gas station, stop on red lights),
• foreseeability (what a reasonable, prudent person equipped with an extra knowledge accessible to the perpetrator would consider as foreseeable thus neither entirely extraordinary nor unexpected)
• “but for” principle basically based on the sane notion that we need to verify if the act in question was actually the cause of the result (but for the open fire at the gas station there would not be any fire, but for his driving, through the red light these cars would not crash)

The doctrine and judiciary have figured out the way to handle the “but for” test, which stems from the contitio sine qua non. The issue was how far in the past should we back with our analysis of the cause? If a perpetrator was not conceived in the first place obviously, he would not have killed anyone. So did his parents cause the death?  This type of reasoning is called “regress towards infinity” (lat. regressus ad infinitum). In criminal law, in this perspective, we should only account for the causes which are prospective to the moment when the unacceptable danger starts. It is a legal prerequisite because the unaccepted danger is a purely normative evaluation. Let’s have an example:

A drives his car and does not stop on a red light before tracks. Train hits the car killing his passenger B.

How would the “but for” principle work? Definitely, if A left his home either 10 minutes earlier or 10 minutes later he would not have crossed the train path. But it does not help. Leaving home at the certain time is legally irrelevant. What we should be really interested are all the things that happened when the unacceptable risk occurred, meaning at the time of approaching to the red light. The law says that you should observe the color of the light and if it is red slow down till complete halt. This demanded behavior is supposed to reduce the risk of being hit by a train to 0.  Now in this narrowed scenario, we examine the rules-breaking behavior of A. “But for” his continuation of driving despite the red light in the contexts of a train approaching the intersection, the crash would have never occurred.

So we pretty much know when to stop going in the past. But what with the opposite direction? How far ahead with result attribution shall we proceed.

„But for”, proximate cause – is it enough?

Now, back to the dinosaur scenario…

The crucial issue in question is how far in the future shall we look and decide about an individual’s criminal liability?

We all have some basic intuition that releasing most lethal animals there are into the populated area infringes the safeguard rules stemming from the law (don’t do harm) and it is quite foreseeable for dinosaur experts as Owen and Claire what T-Rex, Velociraptor and Allosaurus are capable of (we have seen the first movie and the series itself). When the Bad Guy was devoured on the premises of the mansion we had no doubts that it was solely because the hungry, angry dinosaurs were walking around quite unattended and unstoppable.  The guy would not have become a snack “but for” the release (provided nobody presses the button, dinosaurs perish from the toxic gas).

So, this is the toughest part – we may clearly establish the safeguards infringement, the foreseeability of high degree of what would happen, and the but-for test is pretty much met. However, we know that there will be almost certainly incidents of dinosaurs attacking and killing humans in the future. How far in the future we should worry about?

Criminal law has developed the “proximate cause” filter which as a concept is designed to eliminate too remote results from being attributed to the initial perpetrator. Many times, it intertwines with the foreseeability as such. But this is not the case here. Model Penal Code (apart from all criticism brought by P. Robinson) provided at least some basic intuition. In section 2.03 it is required that “result (…) is not too remote or accidental in its occurrence to have a just bearing on the actor’s liability or on the gravity of his offense”. So, there is no one general answer what is too remote or accidental, but it depends strongly on the result as an element of a particular crime. The more severe the crime is, probably more remote happenings shall be attributed to the person.

In the dinosaur case – surely all of the killings done instantly by the reptiles at the premises of the mansion (guests, security guards, the bad guy, etc.) without any doubt may be considered as proximate. I think that also those injuries and deaths that happen before the general public is warned by the officials that a bunch of dangerous animals are on the loose and pose a deadly peril to everybody within a certain perimeter.

However, after some time we may be sure that particular authorities will engage and start a widespread hunt (as it happens when a snake or other dangerous animal runs free where it is not supposed to). What if they do not manage to deal with all the animals within a reasonable time or the dinosaurs hide (or are satisfied with a regular game)? It seems like a fair and just compromise to diminish the proximity of the results proportionally to the engagement of the authorities and development of new safety rules for individuals living in potentially dangerous areas. At some point, there must be a break in legal attribution. Remember – we debate solely on the legal perspective. Thus the law may by its regulation cease the scope of criminal law operation. The phrase “too remote” seems to be in order.

Intentional or not?

What also may be quite important to Owen and Claire is whether they will be liable for murder or unintentional causing of death (manslaughter?). It also seems like a tough one. They definitely did not desire to have the dinosaurs kill anyone but come on! They must have at least see the extremely high probability of such a development of events and did nothing to minimize it. They accepted that scenario. It was definitely within their contemplation. I think the shorter timeline from the release the more facts may convince us that those deaths are intentional. However, if we are temporally far from the cause and heading towards the limits of proximity, it is conceivable to deem the intent to be gone (too many additional, unrelated and not fully contemplated facts accumulate as time lapses).

As you may see even a really stupid movie may bring a great case for fundamental criminal law deliberations 😉