Relative Impact of Crime on the Victim and Responsibility of the Guilty

The crime committed against the victim, if an internal factor (such as disease) or an external penal factor (such as injury) or an external nonpenal factor (such as fall from height) is added to it, may sometime lead to the death of the victim. In such cases, since another factor has been involved in the death of victim, three probabilities are at stake of the responsibility of the criminal: “full responsibility”, “absence of responsibility” and “relative responsibility”. In this writing, it has been assumed that the standard for responsibility is that crime should be correctly ascribed; thus, in cases in which there is no justification to ascribe the crime to the criminal, his responsibility will be null and void; in a case in which death may be fully ascribed to [the crime committed by] the criminal. Responsibility will be fully that of hi, and if it [death] may be ascribed both to the crime and another factor, the criminal will be responsible as much as his act has been of influence in occurrence of the result; of course, it should be noted that under each and every condition, the criminal will be responsible, if the time interval between the original crime and occurrence of result is not more than one year.