Why Criminal Responsibility for Negligence Cannot be Indirect

A popular way to try to justify holding defendants criminally responsible for inadvertent negligence is via an indirect or “tracing” approach, i.e. an approach which traces the inad-vertence back to prior culpable action. I argue that this indirect approach to criminal neg-ligence fails because it cannot account for a key feature of how criminal negligence should be (and sometimes is) assessed. Specifically, it cannot account for why, when considering whether a defendant is negligent, what counts as a risk should be assessed relative to the defendant’s evidence