This chapter focuses on the place which the criminal law of most countries allocates to the idea of intention — as one of the principal determinants both of liability to punishment and of its severity. All civilized penal systems make liability to punishment for serious crime dependent not merely on the fact that the person to be punished has done the outward act of a crime, but on his having done it in a certain state of frame of mind or will. These mental or intellectual elements are many and various, and are collected together in the terminology of English jurists under the simple sounding description of mens rea, a guilty mind. The most prominent of these mental elements, and in many ways the most important, is a man's intention. In English law and in most other legal systems intention, or something like it, is relevant at two different stages: conviction and sentence.
Keywords: criminal punishment, criminal law, intent, conviction, sentence, English law, mens rea, liability to punishment,