LawByLak — Topic 16: Intoxication (OCR H418, Paper 1)

Topic 16 · Intoxication

One line

The only criminal defence OCR has examined both ways, and the one students most often get backwards.

Short blurb, for a listing card

Intoxication looks like the hardest of the mental capacity defences and is in fact the most orderly. Two questions, four cells, and a ladder with two rungs missing. This guide teaches the order you ask them in, because every examiner report on this topic describes candidates who asked them the wrong way round.

Full description

Most students meet intoxication and start with the drink. That is the mistake. The offence is classified first, and until you know whether you are in a specific or a basic intent crime you do not know whether the defence exists at all. The June 2023 examiner put it plainly: candidates were "confused about which of the offences were specific and basic intent".

So this guide is built in the order the exam rewards. The two questions. The four cells they produce. The fall-back ladder, and the two places where the ladder simply stops, which is where the strongest evaluation argument in the topic lives. Then the mistake rule, its statute, and the single exception that exists because of how one subsection happened to be drafted.

Intoxication is also the only criminal defence OCR has set as both a problem question and a 20-mark essay, which is why the evaluation half gets three full pages rather than a footnote: six arguments each with its counter, the complete reform record from Butler in 1975 to the Law Commission in 2009, and all seven of the specification's framework words.

Every case is checked against the law report, every statutory quotation against legislation.gov.uk, and every exam claim against the papers themselves. Where OCR's own published documents state the law incorrectly, we say so, give the page number, and state it correctly.

What's inside

• 21 authorities in full, grouped by the element they prove, with the 16 OCR badges marked
• Both real problem questions worked in full, and both real essay stems
• A complete Level 4 model answer on the newest question, with the six-point self-marking checklist
• The fall-back ladder, the four-cell grid, and MTRB18, PSLD, OVID and IDA
• 18 pin-cited examiner quotations across six pages of OCR's own reports
• Last-minute page, 15-term glossary, and a plan for when your mind goes blank