Moral Wrongfulness in Canadian Case Law
| Decision/Law | Holding/Statute |
|---|---|
| s. 16 of the Criminal Code (as amended by S.C. 1991, c.43, s.2) | 16. (1) No person is criminally responsible for an act committed or an omission made while suffering from a mental disorder that rendered the person incapable of appreciating the nature and quality of the act or omission or of knowing that it was wrong.1 |
| M’Naughten Rules (1843) | An accused is culpable unless at the material time of the crime the individual was in a state of mind such that the person did not know what the person was doing when committing the act or that the person knew what the person was doing but did not know that it was wrong.2 |
| R v. Chaulk (1990) | Wrongfulness means either “legal or moral” wrongfulness; broadening of cognitive test to include moral wrongfulness4 |
| R v. Ratti (1991) | Causal delusions do not equate to NCRMD; the accused is culpable if the person is capable of knowing the act, in its circumstances, would have been “morally condemned by reasonable members of society”; symptoms of a mental disorder that motivate the accused do not equate to a finding of NCRMD (Ref. 12, p 80). |
| R v. Oommen (1994) | Articulated the notion of rational perception and the need for an accused to be able to apply knowledge of wrongfulness in the circumstance, in addition to the intellectual ability to know right from wrong in an abstract sense5 |
| R v. Bharwani (2025) (dissent)a | Endorsed the standard set in Oommen; an accused is NCRMD if compulsion caused by a mental disorder prevented rational and conscious application of moral knowledge of wrongfulness at the time of the crime (including knowledge that society would view the criminal act as wrong)13 |
a The majority in Bharwani did not address the question of NCRMD, and the Court’s commentary was thus limited to the nonbinding but persuasive interpretation of the dissent.