ABSTRACT
Criminal law is concerned with the kind of conduct that is subject to state punishment. In most common law jurisdictions, a defendant on a criminal charge normally has to be found guilty in mind as well as in deed. The guilty mind is called the mens rea. As a fundamental component of mens rea intention is one of the most important concepts in criminal law. One factor that complicates the distinction between civil negligence and criminal recklessness is the category of gross negligence, which is criminal and in effect equivalent to recklessness, despite the inadvertence. For just over twenty years - 1982-2003 - the Caldwell test was applied to cases of recklessness, thus allowing the objective test alongside the old subjective test, such that juries who failed to find defendants guilty according to their actual state of mind could fall back on the grounds of what a reasonable and prudent individual would understand about the risks they were running.
