2 Meaning and Constituent Elements of Actus Reus

Actus reus — "the guilty act" — is everything in the offence's definition except the accused's mental state: the prohibited conduct (act or omission), the circumstances (the act's context elements — that the property was "another's"; that the woman did "not consent"), and the consequences (the result — death, injury, destruction) plus, for result crimes, causation linking conduct to consequence.Constituent elements (the four-part checklist):1. Conduct — the act, omission or state of affairs (Section 3);2. Circumstances — the specified conditions that make the conduct criminal (taking property "belonging to another");3. Consequence — the prohibited result (in result crimes);4. Causation — the conduct must have caused the consequence: the two-stage test of (a) factual causation (the but-for test: but for the act, would the harm have occurred when it did?) and (b) legal/proximate causation (policy's limit: is the result too remote? The intervening cause doctrine — novus actus interveniens — a free, deliberate and informed human act or a genuinely extraordinary natural event breaking the chain; medical negligence'sspecial cases; the "thin skull" rule — the accused takes the victim as found: if the blow kills a haemophiliac, the killer cannot complain the victim was unusually fragile).The syllabus prescribes a case for this section; its citation and holding are withheld until verified.