The term medical negligence1 has acquired a connotation in legal parlance that is at once evocative of both civil and criminal liability and at the same time mutually exclusive in meaning.2 This paper however concentrates on the criminal liability of medical practitioners for negligent conducts in the course of their medical practice.
Generally, liability for negligence in the criminal law raises some fundamental questions going to the root of the legal basis of criminal responsibility.3 While negligence is recognized as a basis for criminal liability in Nigeria, neither in the Criminal Code4 nor in the Penal Code5 is a definition of criminal negligence provided. It has been suggested that the definitive content of criminal negligence is only discoverable from books, statutes and judicial dicta.6 It is submitted however, that the absence of the definition of criminal negligence does not a priori exclude from the codes clear and unambiguous provisions dealing with categories of conducts that may constitute criminal negligence.