company was acquitted on the facts, but the principle that the company might have been convicted of this offence was not questioned. The principle of corporate liability came to be argued before the courts following the Zeebrugge ferry disaster. The coroner conducting the inquest held that a corporation could not be indicted. This decision was challenged by way of judicial review in R v HM Coroner for East Kent ex p Spooner (1989). Bingham LJ then said:

doi:10.4324/9781843140504-135

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company was acquitted on the facts, but the principle that the company might have been convicted of this offence was not questioned. The principle of corporate liability came to be argued before the courts following the Zeebrugge ferry disaster. The coroner conducting the inquest held that a corporation could not be indicted. This decision was challenged by way of judicial review in R v HM Coroner for East Kent ex p Spooner (1989). Bingham LJ then said:

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ABSTRACT

P&O EUROPEAN FERRIES (DOVER) LTD (1991) 93 Cr App R 72

Central Criminal Court (Turner J)

... The main thrust of the argument for the company in support of the submission that the four counts of manslaughter in this indictment should be quashed was not merely that English law does not recognise the offence of corporate manslaughter but that, as a matter of positive English law, manslaughter can only be committed when one natural person kills another natural person. Hence, it was no accident that there is no record of any corporation or non-natural person having been successfully prosecuted for manslaughter in any English court. It was, however, accepted that there is no conceptual difficulty in attributing a criminal state of mind to a corporation. The broad argument advanced on behalf of the prosecution was that, there being no all embracing statutory definition of murder or manslaughter, there is, in principle, no reason why a corporation, or other non-natural person, cannot be found guilty of most offences in the criminal calendar.