Kuwait Court of Cassation principle number 168

Summary: - Negligence or delay in treating the victim. Does not break the causal link unless it is established that it was intentional in order to aggravate liability. Disputing the existence of a causal relationship between the victim’s injuries and his death, leading to contradiction of the picture formed in the judge’s mind and constituting an attempt to impugn the evidence in the case. Is not admissible before the Court of Cassation. Rule: Whereas it is apparent from the text of the first-instance judgment, whose reasons were adopted by the challenged judgment, that it established the causal relationship between the victim’s injury, the details of which it cited from the autopsy report, and his death, stating: “The court infers from the case papers the existence of that relationship between the act of assault and the resulting outcome, namely the victim’s death, and the connection of that outcome to that act by the link between cause and effect, relying on what was stated in the autopsy report and the report’s attribution that, upon examination of the body of the victim ‘........................’, it was found that his injury to the right thigh was a recent antemortem firearm injury caused by relatively large shot pellets discharged from a smooth-bore shotgun, and could have been caused by ammunition and a weapon such as those seized in the case, and that death was attributable to the injured condition and the accompanying laceration of the blood vessels and muscles of the right thigh and fracture of its bone, compounded by bleeding....” What the judgment stated as set out above was sufficient to establish the causal relationship between the appellant’s act of firing a shot at the victim, causing the injury that was the direct cause of his death. Negligence or delay in treating the victim—even assuming it to be true—does not break the causal link unless it is established that it was intentional in order to aggravate liability—which the appellant did not allege. What he raises in this regard is no more than an attempt to impugn the evidence in the case in a particular manner, thereby seeking to contradict the picture formed in the mind of the trial judge, which may not be raised before the Court of Cassation.