§ 15.01 GENERAL PRINCIPLES

• Jurisdiction: North Carolina

§ 15.01. General Principles

A crime contains an actus reus and, almost always, a mens rea. More specifically, a person may not be convicted of an offense unless the prosecutor proves beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant, with the requisite mental state, performed a voluntary act (or rarely, omitted a legal duty) that actually and proximately caused the proscribed social harm. Implicit in this statement is an additional prerequisite to criminal liability: the concurrence of the actus reus and the mens rea.¹

The principle of concurrence contains two components, discussed in the next two sections of this chapter. First, there must be temporal concurrence. That is, the defendant must possess the requisite mens rea at the same moment that her voluntary conduct (or omission) causes the social harm (the actus reus).² Second, there must be motivational concurrence: The defendant's conduct that caused the social harm must have been set into motion or impelled by the thought process that constituted the mens rea of the offense.

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Notes:

^[1] . The concurrence principle is codified in a few state penal codes. E.g., Cal. Penal Code § 20 (2015), which provides that "[i]n every crime . . . there must exist...