R v Dudley and Stephens

R v Dudley and Stephens

R v Dudley and Stephens (1884) 14 QBD 273 DC is a leading English criminal case which established a precedent throughout the common law world that necessity is not a defence to a charge of murder. It concerned survival cannibalism following a shipwreck and its purported justification on the basis of a custom of the sea. It marked the culmination of a long history of attempts by the law, in the face of a bank of public opinion sympathetic to famished castaways, to outlaw the custom (cases of which were little-publicised until after the death of perpetrators) and it became a legal cause célèbre in the last ​16¹⁄₂ years of Victorian Britain, particularly among mariners.

Dudley and Stephens were shipwrecked along with two other men. When one of them, the cabin boy Richard Parker, fell into a coma, Dudley and Stephens decided to kill him for food.

Sketch of the Mignonette by Tom Dudley

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R_v_Dudley_and_Stephens
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