R v Dear [1996] Crim LR 595 (CA) FACTS: The appellant's 12-year-old daughter told him that the victim had sexually assaulted her. The appellant repeatedly slashed the victim with a Stanley knife. Subsequent to receiving medical treatment, the victim's wounds opened up and two days later the victim died. D claimed that the chain of causation had been broken because V had committed suicide, either by reopening his wounds or, the wounds having reopened naturally, by failing to take steps to staunch the consequent blood flow. Dear was convicted of murder. HELD: The Court of Appeal rejected his appeal. Rose LJ held:

'The correct approach in the criminal law is to ask ... were the injuries by the defendant an operating and significant cause of death? That question, in our judgment, is necessarily answered, not by philosophical analysis, but by common sense according to all the circumstances of the particular case. In the present case the cause of the deceased's death was bleeding from the artery which the defendant had severed. Whether or not the resumption or continuation of that bleeding was deliberately caused by the deceased, the jury were entitled to find that the defendant’s conduct made an operative and significant contribution to the death.'