-in Farm attempted murder case
LOCAL prosecutor Ms. Konyo Sandiford in support of her arguments in the Farm Wedding House attempted murder and grievous bodily harm case against Naresh Singh called ‘Baby’ and Mohan Hariram called ‘Rockey’, cited a 1973 British case which revealed how a judge had rejected a submission by an appellant who had submitted that his indictment for murder should not be accepted as read, since the victim, a Jehovah’s Witness had brought about her own demise by deciding to die rather than take a blood transfusion.
Her intention was to show that there were similar instances in the British case that supported the prosecution’s arguments in the local case.
The prosecutor had cited the R v Blaue’s case to show that a Jehovah’s Witness, Jacolyn Woodhead was violently stabbed and died because she had refused to accept blood transfusion, and that the accused was seeking to escape his wrong doing by the action of the 18-year old girl who acted in accordance with her religious beliefs.
The appellant in the British case had contended that the victim by her own action in refusing the blood transfusion had added to the cause of her death.                               In that case the appellant had attacked a young girl with a knife, causing a serious stab wound which pierced her lung.
The girl was taken to hospital. She had lost a large amount of blood and was told by the surgical registrar that a blood transfusion was necessary.
The girl refused the blood transfusion on the ground that it was contrary to her religious beliefs.
She was told that if she did not have the transfusion she would die. She persisted in her refusal and died the following day.
The physical cause of death was the bleeding into the pleural cavity 446 arising from the penetration of the lung.
The appellant was convicted of manslaughter. He appealed, contended that the girl’s refusal to have a blood transfusion was unreasonable and had broken the chain of causation between the stabbing and her death.
The Appellate Court held that it was the policy of the law that a person who used violence on another had to take his victim as he found him (The thin skull rule). It was not open to an assailant to assert that the victim’s religious beliefs, which inhibited the victim from seeking certain kinds of treatment, were unreasonable.
On the admitted facts “the judge was entitled to tell the jury that the stab wound was an operative cause of death. The appellant had been properly convicted and the appeal would therefore be dismissed,” the Appellate court ruled.