Dishonesty

Dishonesty is to act without honesty. It is used to describe a lack of probity, cheating,lying or being deliberately deceptive or a lack in integrity, knavishness, perfidiosity, corruption or treacherousness. Dishonesty is the fundamental component of a majority of offences relating to the acquisition, conversion and disposal of property (tangible or intangible) defined in criminal law such as fraud.

Dishonesty has had a number of definitions. For many years, there were two views of what constituted dishonesty in English law. The first contention was that the definitions of dishonesty (such as those within the Theft Act 1968) described a course of action, whereas the second contention was that the definition described a state of mind. A clear test within the criminal law emerged from R v Ghosh (1982) 75 CR App. R. 154. The Court of Appeal held that dishonesty is an element of mens rea, clearly referring to a state of mind, and that overall, the test that must be applied is hybrid, but with a subjective bias which "looks into the mind" of the person concerned and establishes what he was thinking. The test is two-stage:

The decision of whether a particular action or set of actions is dishonest remains separate from the issue of moral justification. For example, when Robin Hood robbed the Sheriff of Nottingham he knew that he was, in effect, stealing from the Crown, was acting dishonestly and would have been properly convicted of robbery. His argument would have been that he was morally justified in acting in this way but in modern legal terms this could only have been brought to the court by way of mitigation of sentencing and would not have affected the inference of dishonesty.

Where dishonesty is an issue in civil cases, the trend in English Law is for only the actions to be tested objectively and not to apply any test as to the subjective state of mind of the actor.

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