"…the dangerous driving must have played a part, not simply in creating the occasion of the fatal accident but in bringing it about." 12. Albeit the judge directed the jury in accordance with this principle, Mr Bridge argued the judge himself never properly addressed this question. Had he done so, he would have felt obliged to withdraw the case from the jury. We disagree. In our judgment, this was a case very properly left to the jury. We accept Mr Bridge may have had at his disposal many very powerful arguments, but it was for the jury to decide whether or not they found the prosecution witnesses and, in particular, Miss Ferguson reliable and accurate. If they did, they were entitled to conclude that the appellant was driving a truck with a heavy load at or over 50 miles per hour along a busy road where the speed limit was 70 miles per hour. On Miss Ferguson's version of events, the sofa was obviously working itself free as he drove along. It must have been banging noisily in the back of the Mitsubishi. If so the appellant could and should have driven in a different fashion, or he should have stopped earlier than he did. Instead, he continued on his journey until his load fell off and into the path of oncoming vehicles. He stopped with his vehicle still partly on the carriageway. His actions made both the Mitsubishi and the sofa immediate hazards to oncoming traffic. 13. The jury was entitled to find that the appellant put other road users at risk by driving dangerously. He drove with a load which was insecure. Had he not done so the sofa would not have fallen off, and Mr Wildman would not have been forced to drive round it. He would not have been distracted by it or turned to warn others coming behind him. The appellant's car would not have been stopped in the carriageway and Mr Wildman would not have driven into the back of it. Whatever criticisms Mr Bridge could properly make of Mr Wildman's driving, in our judgment all those circumstances are such that it was open to the jury to find that his dangerous driving played more than a minimal role in bringing about the accident and the death. 14. We turn therefore to the further criticisms made of the judge by Mr Bridge. The second ground of appeal is that the judge, it is said, failed adequately to sum up the law in respect of causation. The judge summed up the law in this way: "
"I may suggest reasons to you for doing something; I may urge you to do it, tell you it will pay you to do it, tell you it is your duty to do it. My efforts may perhaps make it very much more likely that you will do it. But they do not cause you to do it, in the sense in which one causes a kettle of water to boil by putting it on the stove. Your volitional act is regarded (within the doctrine of responsibility) as setting a new 'chain of causation' going, irrespective of what has happened before."
"The free, deliberate, and informed intervention of a second person, who intends to exploit the situation created by the first, but is not acting in concert with him, is normally held to relieve the first actor of criminal responsibility."
"Principals cause, accomplices encourage (or otherwise influence) or help. If the instigator were regarded as causing the result he would be a principal, and the conceptual division between principals (or, as I prefer to call them, perpetrators) and accessories would vanish. Indeed, it was because the instigator was not regarded as causing the crime that the notion of accessories had to be developed. This is the irrefragable argument for recognising the novus actus principle as one of the bases of our criminal law. The final act is done by the perpetrator, and his guilt pushes the accessories, conceptually speaking, into the background. Accessorial liability is, in the traditional theory, 'derivative' from that of the perpetrator."