analyze the case the Queen v. Dudley and Stephens. This is a seminal case from England from 1884, and it is still good law in the United States. Monty Python did a sketch based upon it. It is a hard read, but this is the first case all law students read in law school, anywhere in the English-speaking world.

To get 20 points, I expect to see the following in your initial post:

- what are the facts?

- what is the issue? (I)

- what is the rule? (R)

- how does the rule apply to the facts? (A)

- what conclusion did the Court come to? (C)

There remains to be considered the real question in the case - whether killing under The special verdict as, after certain objections by Mr. Collins to which the Attorney General yielded, it is finally settled before us is as follows. (His Lordship read the special the circumstances set forth in the verdict be or be not murder. The contention that it could verdict as above set out.) From these facts, stated with the cold precision of a special verdict, it appears sufficiently that the prisoners were subject to terrible temptation, to be anything else was, to the minds of us all, both new and strange, and we stopped the Attorney General in his negative argument in order that we might hear what could be said in support of a proposition which appeared to us to be at once dangerous, immoral, and sufferings which might break down the bodily power of the strongest man and try the conscience of the best. Other details yet more harrowing, facts still more loathsome and opposed to all legal principle and analogy. All, no doubt, that can be said has been urged appalling, were presented to the jury, and are to be found recorded in my learned Brother's before us, and we are now to consider and determine what it amounts to. First it is said that it follows from various definitions of murder in books of authority, which definitions notes. But nevertheless this is clear, that the prisoners put to death a weak and unoffending boy upon the chance of preserving their own lives by feeding upon his flesh and blood after he was killed, and with the certainty of depriving him of any possible imply, if they do not state, the doctrine, that in order to save your own life you may lawfully take away the life of another, when that other is neither attempting nor threatening yours, chance of survival. The verdict finds in terms that if the men had not fed upon the body of nor is guilty of any illegal act whatever towards you or any one else. But if these definitions the boy they would probably not have survived," and that, "the boy being in a much weaker be looked at they will not be found to sustain this contention.... condition was likely to have died before them." They might possibly have been picked up Now, except for the purpose of testing how far the conservation of a man's own life next day by a passing ship; they might possibly not have been picked up at all; in either case it is obvious that the killing of the boy would have been an unnecessary and profitless act. It is found by the verdict that the boy was incapable of resistance, and, in fact, made is in all cases and under all circumstances an absolute, unqualified and paramount duty, we exclude from our consideration all the incidents of war. We are dealing with a case of none; and it is not even suggested that his death was due to any violence on his part private homicide, not one imposed upon men in the service of their Sovereign and in the attempted against, or even so much as feared by, those who killed him. Under these defence of their country. Now it is admitted that the deliberate killing of this unoffending and unresisting boy was clearly murder, unless the killing can be [p. 287] justified by some circumstances the jury say that they are ignorant whether those who killed him were guilty of murder, and have referred it to this Court to [p. 280) determine what is the legal well-recognised excuse admitted by the law. It is further admitted that there was in this consequence which follows from the facts which they have found. case no such excuse, unless the killing was justified by what has been called "necessity." But the temptation to the act which existed here was not what the law has ever called necessity. Nor is this to be regretted. Though law and morality are not the same, and many p. 54 and c. 40; East's Pleas of the Crown, p. 221, citing Dalton, c. 98, "Homicide of With regard to the substantial question in the case-whether the prisoners in killing Parker were guilty of murder-the law is that where a private person acting upon his own judgment takes the life of a fellow creature, his act can only be justified on the ground of Necessity," and several cases Lord Bacon, Bac. Max, Reg. 5. gives the instance of two shipwrecked persons clinging to the same plank and one of them thrusting the other from self-defence-self-defence against the acts of the person whose life is taken. This principle it, finding that it will not support both, and says that this homicide is excusable through unavoidable necessity and upon the great universal principle of self-preservation, which has been extended to include the case of a man killing another to prevent him from committing some great crime upon a third person. But the principle has no application to prompts every man to save his own life in preference to that of another where one of them this case, for the prisoners were not protecting themselves against any act of Parker. If he must inevitably perish. It is true that Hale's Pleas of the Crown, p. 54, states distinctly that had had food in his possession and they had taken it from him, they would have been guilty hunger is no excuse for theft, but that is on the ground that there can be no such extreme of theft; and if they killed him to obtain this food, they would have been guilty of murder... necessity in this country. In the present case the prisoners were in circumstances where no assistance could be given. The essence of the crime of murder is intention, and here the A. Collins, Q.C., for the prisoners. intention of the prisoners was only to preserve their lives. ... The facts found on the special verdict shew that the prisoners were not guilty of Dec. 9. murder, at the time when they killed Parker but killed him under the pressure of necessity. Necessity will excuse an act which would otherwise be a crime. Stephen, Digest of Criminal The judgment of the Court (Lord Coleridge, C...Grove and Denman, J., Pollock and Huddleston, B-B.) was delivered by LORD COLERIDGE, C.). Law, art. 32, Necessity. The law as to compulsion by necessity is further explained in Stephen's History of the Criminal Law, vol. ii., p. 108, and an opinion is expressed that in the case often put by casuists, of two drowning men on a plank large enough to support one The two prisoners, Thomas Dudley and Edwin Stephens, were indicted for the only, and one thrusting the other off the survivor could not be subjected to legal murder of Richard Parker on the high seas on the 25th of July in the present year. They were tried before my Brother Huddleston at Exeter on the 6th of November, and under the punishment in the American case of the United States v. Holmes, the proposition that a passenger on board a vessel may be thrown overboard to save the others is sanctioned. direction of my learned Brother, the jury returned a special verdict, the legal effect of which has been argued before us, and on which we are now to pronounce judgment. , . The law as to inevitable necessity is fully considered [p. 278) in Russell on Crimes, vol. I, p. 847, and there are passages relating it in Brasten. vol.ii. p. 277; Hale's Pleas of the Crown, There remains to be considered the real question in the case - whether killing under The special verdict as, after certain objections by Mr. Collins to which the Attorney General yielded, it is finally settled before us is as follows. (His Lordship read the special the circumstances set forth in the verdict be or be not murder. The contention that it could verdict as above set out.) From these facts, stated with the cold precision of a special verdict, it appears sufficiently that the prisoners were subject to terrible temptation, to be anything else was, to the minds of us all, both new and strange, and we stopped the Attorney General in his negative argument in order that we might hear what could be said in support of a proposition which appeared to us to be at once dangerous, immoral, and sufferings which might break down the bodily power of the strongest man and try the conscience of the best. Other details yet more harrowing, facts still more loathsome and opposed to all legal principle and analogy. All, no doubt, that can be said has been urged appalling, were presented to the jury, and are to be found recorded in my learned Brother's before us, and we are now to consider and determine what it amounts to. First it is said that it follows from various definitions of murder in books of authority, which definitions notes. But nevertheless this is clear, that the prisoners put to death a weak and unoffending boy upon the chance of preserving their own lives by feeding upon his flesh and blood after he was killed, and with the certainty of depriving him of any possible imply, if they do not state, the doctrine, that in order to save your own life you may lawfully take away the life of another, when that other is neither attempting nor threatening yours, chance of survival. The verdict finds in terms that if the men had not fed upon the body of nor is guilty of any illegal act whatever towards you or any one else. But if these definitions the boy they would probably not have survived," and that, "the boy being in a much weaker be looked at they will not be found to sustain this contention.... condition was likely to have died before them." They might possibly have been picked up Now, except for the purpose of testing how far the conservation of a man's own life next day by a passing ship; they might possibly not have been picked up at all; in either case it is obvious that the killing of the boy would have been an unnecessary and profitless act. It is found by the verdict that the boy was incapable of resistance, and, in fact, made is in all cases and under all circumstances an absolute, unqualified and paramount duty, we exclude from our consideration all the incidents of war. We are dealing with a case of none; and it is not even suggested that his death was due to any violence on his part private homicide, not one imposed upon men in the service of their Sovereign and in the attempted against, or even so much as feared by, those who killed him. Under these defence of their country. Now it is admitted that the deliberate killing of this unoffending and unresisting boy was clearly murder, unless the killing can be [p. 287] justified by some circumstances the jury say that they are ignorant whether those who killed him were guilty of murder, and have referred it to this Court to [p. 280) determine what is the legal well-recognised excuse admitted by the law. It is further admitted that there was in this consequence which follows from the facts which they have found. case no such excuse, unless the killing was justified by what has been called "necessity." But the temptation to the act which existed here was not what the law has ever called necessity. Nor is this to be regretted. Though law and morality are not the same, and many youngest, the most unresisting, was chosen. Was it more [p. 288] necessary to kill him than things may be immoral which are not necessarily illegal, yet the absolute divorce of law from morality would be of fatal consequence; and such divorce would follow if the temptation to murder in this case were to be held by law an absolute defence of it. It is not one of the grown men? The answer must be "No" - so. To preserve one's life is generally speaking a duty, but it may be the plainest and the "So spake the Fiend, and with necessity, The tyrant's plea, excused his devilish deeds." highest duty to sacrifice it. War is full of instances in which it is a man's duty not to live, but to die. The duty, in case of shipwreck, of a captain to his crew, of the crew to the passengers, of soldiers to women and children, as in the noble case of the Birkenhead: It is not suggested that in this particular case the deeds were devilish, but it is quite plain that such a principle once admitted might be made the legal cloak for unbridled these duties impose on men the moral necessity, not of the preservations but of the sacrifice of their lives for others, from which in no country, least of all, it is to be hoped, in passion and atrocious crime. There is no safe path for judges to tread but to ascertain the England, will men ever shrink as indeed, they have not shrunk. It is not correct, therefore, law to the best of their ability and to declare it according to their judgment; and if in any to say that there is any absolute or unqualified necessity to preserve one's life. "Necesse est case the law appears to be too severe on individuals, to leave it to the Sovereign to exercise ut case, non ut vivan" is a saying of a Roman officer quoted by Lord Bacon himself with that prerogative of mercy which the Constitution has intrusted to the hands fittest to high eulogy in the very chapter on necessity to which so much reference has been made. It dispense it. would be a very easy and cheap display of commonplace learning to quote from Greek and Latin authors, from Horace, from Juvenal, from Cicero, from Euripides, passage after It must not be supposed that in refusing to admit temptation to be an excuse for passages, in which the duty of dying for others has been laid down in glowing and emphatic crime it is forgotten how terrible the temptation was; how awful the suffering: how hard in language as resulting from the principles of heathen ethics; it is enough in a Christian such trials to keep the judgment straight and the conduct pure. We are often compelled to country to remind ourselves of the Great Example whom we profess to follow. It is not set up standards we cannot reach ourselves, and to lay down rules which we could not needful to point out the awful danger of admitting the principle which has been contended ourselves satisfy. But a man has no right to declare temptation to be an excuse, though he might himself have yielded to it, nor allow compassion for the criminal to change or for. Who is to be the judge of this sort of necessity? By what measure is the comparative value of lives to be measured? Is it to be strength, or intellect, or what? It is plain that the weaken in any manner the legal definition of the crime. It is therefore our duty to declare principle leaves to him who is to profit by it to determine the necessity which will justify that the prisoners' act in this case was wilful.murder, that the facts as stated in the verdict him in deliberately taking another's life to save his own. In this case the weakest, the are no legal justification of the homicide; and to say that in our unanimous opinion the prisoners are upon this special verdict guilty, of murder. [n. 1] THE COURT then proceeded to pass sentence of death upon the prisoners. [n. 2] Solicitors for the Crown: The Solicitors for the Treasury. Solicitors for the prisoners: Irvine & Hodges. 1. My brother Grove has furnished me with the following suggestion, too late to be embodied in the judgment but well worth preserving: " If the two accused men were justified in killing Parker, then if not rescued in time, two of the three survivors would be justified in killing the third, and of two who remained the stronger would be justified in killing the weaker, so that three men might be justifiably killed to give the fourth a chance of surviving." - C. 2. This sentence was afterwards commuted by the Crown to six months' imprisonment. There remains to be considered the real question in the case - whether killing under The special verdict as, after certain objections by Mr. Collins to which the Attorney General yielded, it is finally settled before us is as follows. (His Lordship read the special the circumstances set forth in the verdict be or be not murder. The contention that it could verdict as above set out.) From these facts, stated with the cold precision of a special verdict, it appears sufficiently that the prisoners were subject to terrible temptation, to be anything else was, to the minds of us all, both new and strange, and we stopped the Attorney General in his negative argument in order that we might hear what could be said in support of a proposition which appeared to us to be at once dangerous, immoral, and sufferings which might break down the bodily power of the strongest man and try the conscience of the best. Other details yet more harrowing, facts still more loathsome and opposed to all legal principle and analogy. All, no doubt, that can be said has been urged appalling, were presented to the jury, and are to be found recorded in my learned Brother's before us, and we are now to consider and determine what it amounts to. First it is said that it follows from various definitions of murder in books of authority, which definitions notes. But nevertheless this is clear, that the prisoners put to death a weak and unoffending boy upon the chance of preserving their own lives by feeding upon his flesh and blood after he was killed, and with the certainty of depriving him of any possible imply, if they do not state, the doctrine, that in order to save your own life you may lawfully take away the life of another, when that other is neither attempting nor threatening yours, chance of survival. The verdict finds in terms that if the men had not fed upon the body of nor is guilty of any illegal act whatever towards you or any one else. But if these definitions the boy they would probably not have survived," and that, "the boy being in a much weaker be looked at they will not be found to sustain this contention.... condition was likely to have died before them." They might possibly have been picked up Now, except for the purpose of testing how far the conservation of a man's own life next day by a passing ship; they might possibly not have been picked up at all; in either case it is obvious that the killing of the boy would have been an unnecessary and profitless act. It is found by the verdict that the boy was incapable of resistance, and, in fact, made is in all cases and under all circumstances an absolute, unqualified and paramount duty, we exclude from our consideration all the incidents of war. We are dealing with a case of none; and it is not even suggested that his death was due to any violence on his part private homicide, not one imposed upon men in the service of their Sovereign and in the attempted against, or even so much as feared by, those who killed him. Under these defence of their country. Now it is admitted that the deliberate killing of this unoffending and unresisting boy was clearly murder, unless the killing can be [p. 287] justified by some circumstances the jury say that they are ignorant whether those who killed him were guilty of murder, and have referred it to this Court to [p. 280) determine what is the legal well-recognised excuse admitted by the law. It is further admitted that there was in this consequence which follows from the facts which they have found. case no such excuse, unless the killing was justified by what has been called "necessity." But the temptation to the act which existed here was not what the law has ever called necessity. Nor is this to be regretted. Though law and morality are not the same, and many p. 54 and c. 40; East's Pleas of the Crown, p. 221, citing Dalton, c. 98, "Homicide of With regard to the substantial question in the case-whether the prisoners in killing Parker were guilty of murder-the law is that where a private person acting upon his own judgment takes the life of a fellow creature, his act can only be justified on the ground of Necessity," and several cases Lord Bacon, Bac. Max, Reg. 5. gives the instance of two shipwrecked persons clinging to the same plank and one of them thrusting the other from self-defence-self-defence against the acts of the person whose life is taken. This principle it, finding that it will not support both, and says that this homicide is excusable through unavoidable necessity and upon the great universal principle of self-preservation, which has been extended to include the case of a man killing another to prevent him from committing some great crime upon a third person. But the principle has no application to prompts every man to save his own life in preference to that of another where one of them this case, for the prisoners were not protecting themselves against any act of Parker. If he must inevitably perish. It is true that Hale's Pleas of the Crown, p. 54, states distinctly that had had food in his possession and they had taken it from him, they would have been guilty hunger is no excuse for theft, but that is on the ground that there can be no such extreme of theft; and if they killed him to obtain this food, they would have been guilty of murder... necessity in this country. In the present case the prisoners were in circumstances where no assistance could be given. The essence of the crime of murder is intention, and here the A. Collins, Q.C., for the prisoners. intention of the prisoners was only to preserve their lives. ... The facts found on the special verdict shew that the prisoners were not guilty of Dec. 9. murder, at the time when they killed Parker but killed him under the pressure of necessity. Necessity will excuse an act which would otherwise be a crime. Stephen, Digest of Criminal The judgment of the Court (Lord Coleridge, C...Grove and Denman, J., Pollock and Huddleston, B-B.) was delivered by LORD COLERIDGE, C.). Law, art. 32, Necessity. The law as to compulsion by necessity is further explained in Stephen's History of the Criminal Law, vol. ii., p. 108, and an opinion is expressed that in the case often put by casuists, of two drowning men on a plank large enough to support one The two prisoners, Thomas Dudley and Edwin Stephens, were indicted for the only, and one thrusting the other off the survivor could not be subjected to legal murder of Richard Parker on the high seas on the 25th of July in the present year. They were tried before my Brother Huddleston at Exeter on the 6th of November, and under the punishment in the American case of the United States v. Holmes, the proposition that a passenger on board a vessel may be thrown overboard to save the others is sanctioned. direction of my learned Brother, the jury returned a special verdict, the legal effect of which has been argued before us, and on which we are now to pronounce judgment. , . The law as to inevitable necessity is fully considered [p. 278) in Russell on Crimes, vol. I, p. 847, and there are passages relating it in Brasten. vol.ii. p. 277; Hale's Pleas of the Crown, There remains to be considered the real question in the case - whether killing under The special verdict as, after certain objections by Mr. Collins to which the Attorney General yielded, it is finally settled before us is as follows. (His Lordship read the special the circumstances set forth in the verdict be or be not murder. The contention that it could verdict as above set out.) From these facts, stated with the cold precision of a special verdict, it appears sufficiently that the prisoners were subject to terrible temptation, to be anything else was, to the minds of us all, both new and strange, and we stopped the Attorney General in his negative argument in order that we might hear what could be said in support of a proposition which appeared to us to be at once dangerous, immoral, and sufferings which might break down the bodily power of the strongest man and try the conscience of the best. Other details yet more harrowing, facts still more loathsome and opposed to all legal principle and analogy. All, no doubt, that can be said has been urged appalling, were presented to the jury, and are to be found recorded in my learned Brother's before us, and we are now to consider and determine what it amounts to. First it is said that it follows from various definitions of murder in books of authority, which definitions notes. But nevertheless this is clear, that the prisoners put to death a weak and unoffending boy upon the chance of preserving their own lives by feeding upon his flesh and blood after he was killed, and with the certainty of depriving him of any possible imply, if they do not state, the doctrine, that in order to save your own life you may lawfully take away the life of another, when that other is neither attempting nor threatening yours, chance of survival. The verdict finds in terms that if the men had not fed upon the body of nor is guilty of any illegal act whatever towards you or any one else. But if these definitions the boy they would probably not have survived," and that, "the boy being in a much weaker be looked at they will not be found to sustain this contention.... condition was likely to have died before them." They might possibly have been picked up Now, except for the purpose of testing how far the conservation of a man's own life next day by a passing ship; they might possibly not have been picked up at all; in either case it is obvious that the killing of the boy would have been an unnecessary and profitless act. It is found by the verdict that the boy was incapable of resistance, and, in fact, made is in all cases and under all circumstances an absolute, unqualified and paramount duty, we exclude from our consideration all the incidents of war. We are dealing with a case of none; and it is not even suggested that his death was due to any violence on his part private homicide, not one imposed upon men in the service of their Sovereign and in the attempted against, or even so much as feared by, those who killed him. Under these defence of their country. Now it is admitted that the deliberate killing of this unoffending and unresisting boy was clearly murder, unless the killing can be [p. 287] justified by some circumstances the jury say that they are ignorant whether those who killed him were guilty of murder, and have referred it to this Court to [p. 280) determine what is the legal well-recognised excuse admitted by the law. It is further admitted that there was in this consequence which follows from the facts which they have found. case no such excuse, unless the killing was justified by what has been called "necessity." But the temptation to the act which existed here was not what the law has ever called necessity. Nor is this to be regretted. Though law and morality are not the same, and many youngest, the most unresisting, was chosen. Was it more [p. 288] necessary to kill him than things may be immoral which are not necessarily illegal, yet the absolute divorce of law from morality would be of fatal consequence; and such divorce would follow if the temptation to murder in this case were to be held by law an absolute defence of it. It is not one of the grown men? The answer must be "No" - so. To preserve one's life is generally speaking a duty, but it may be the plainest and the "So spake the Fiend, and with necessity, The tyrant's plea, excused his devilish deeds." highest duty to sacrifice it. War is full of instances in which it is a man's duty not to live, but to die. The duty, in case of shipwreck, of a captain to his crew, of the crew to the passengers, of soldiers to women and children, as in the noble case of the Birkenhead: It is not suggested that in this particular case the deeds were devilish, but it is quite plain that such a principle once admitted might be made the legal cloak for unbridled these duties impose on men the moral necessity, not of the preservations but of the sacrifice of their lives for others, from which in no country, least of all, it is to be hoped, in passion and atrocious crime. There is no safe path for judges to tread but to ascertain the England, will men ever shrink as indeed, they have not shrunk. It is not correct, therefore, law to the best of their ability and to declare it according to their judgment; and if in any to say that there is any absolute or unqualified necessity to preserve one's life. "Necesse est case the law appears to be too severe on individuals, to leave it to the Sovereign to exercise ut case, non ut vivan" is a saying of a Roman officer quoted by Lord Bacon himself with that prerogative of mercy which the Constitution has intrusted to the hands fittest to high eulogy in the very chapter on necessity to which so much reference has been made. It dispense it. would be a very easy and cheap display of commonplace learning to quote from Greek and Latin authors, from Horace, from Juvenal, from Cicero, from Euripides, passage after It must not be supposed that in refusing to admit temptation to be an excuse for passages, in which the duty of dying for others has been laid down in glowing and emphatic crime it is forgotten how terrible the temptation was; how awful the suffering: how hard in language as resulting from the principles of heathen ethics; it is enough in a Christian such trials to keep the judgment straight and the conduct pure. We are often compelled to country to remind ourselves of the Great Example whom we profess to follow. It is not set up standards we cannot reach ourselves, and to lay down rules which we could not needful to point out the awful danger of admitting the principle which has been contended ourselves satisfy. But a man has no right to declare temptation to be an excuse, though he might himself have yielded to it, nor allow compassion for the criminal to change or for. Who is to be the judge of this sort of necessity? By what measure is the comparative value of lives to be measured? Is it to be strength, or intellect, or what? It is plain that the weaken in any manner the legal definition of the crime. It is therefore our duty to declare principle leaves to him who is to profit by it to determine the necessity which will justify that the prisoners' act in this case was wilful.murder, that the facts as stated in the verdict him in deliberately taking another's life to save his own. In this case the weakest, the are no legal justification of the homicide; and to say that in our unanimous opinion the prisoners are upon this special verdict guilty, of murder. [n. 1] THE COURT then proceeded to pass sentence of death upon the prisoners. [n. 2] Solicitors for the Crown: The Solicitors for the Treasury. Solicitors for the prisoners: Irvine & Hodges. 1. My brother Grove has furnished me with the following suggestion, too late to be embodied in the judgment but well worth preserving: " If the two accused men were justified in killing Parker, then if not rescued in time, two of the three survivors would be justified in killing the third, and of two who remained the stronger would be justified in killing the weaker, so that three men might be justifiably killed to give the fourth a chance of surviving." - C. 2. This sentence was afterwards commuted by the Crown to six months' imprisonment