R v Pagett (1983) 76 Cr App R 279

Pagett, armed with a shotgun, held his pregnant girlfriend in front of him as a shield while he confronted armed police. He fired towards the officers. The officers returned fire in self-defence and struck the girlfriend, killing her. Pagett was charged with her murder but convicted of manslaughter. On appeal, he argued that the officers' shots were an intervening act which caused the death and broke the causal connection between his conduct and the fatal injury. He also challenged the use of his girlfriend's movements in the sequence. The prosecution maintained that Pagett had created the lethal confrontation and that the reasonable defensive response of the police was a foreseeable consequence of his own dangerous acts.

Did the police officers' reasonable return of fire, or the victim's involuntary position as a human shield, break the chain of causation between Pagett's conduct and her death?

The Court of Appeal dismissed Pagett's appeal. His conduct was a substantial and operating cause of the death: he used the victim as a shield and fired at armed officers, provoking their return fire. A reasonable defensive response to the defendant's aggression does not ordinarily amount to a free, deliberate and informed intervening act. The officers acted in self-defence and their conduct did not break the chain. Nor could the victim's involuntary conduct sever causation, because she was acting under Pagett's physical coercion rather than making an independent choice. The jury had been entitled to conclude that, but for Pagett's actions, she would not have been shot and that his contribution was legally significant.

A defendant remains a legal cause of harm where a third party reacts reasonably in self-defence or defence of others to the danger created by the defendant. An involuntary act by the victim also does not break the chain. The intervening act must be sufficiently independent and voluntary to displace the defendant's substantial contribution.

The case is a standard authority on novus actus interveniens in criminal law. It shows that causation turns on the character of the intervening response, not simply on who delivered the final physical blow. Reasonable defensive action is attributed to the danger created by the accused. The decision is commonly compared with R v Kennedy (No 2), where a competent adult's voluntary self-injection did break the chain, and with R v Cheshire on subsequent medical treatment. It also illustrates the basic requirement that the defendant's act be more than a minimal cause.