What the Article on Negligent Homicide Covers
Article 116 of the Criminal Code of Georgia covers causing death by negligence — the situation where a person’s death results not from intent, but from the failure to exercise due care and caution. In practice, this article is most often connected with medical practice: a diagnostic or treatment error, a delayed intervention, or an inadequate form of assistance to which a patient’s life falls victim. At the same time, the same norm extends to every other sphere — construction, technical supervision, driving, everyday situations.
In medicine this is one of the most sensitive charges: on one side stands the fact of a person’s death, on the other — a physician who worked among professional risks. That is precisely why the decisive element in such cases is the independent expert assessment of the causal link: whether the death was the result of exactly that act or omission, or whether its cause lay in the nature of the disease itself.
The Penalty for Causing Death by Negligence
Under the first part of the article, causing death by negligence is punished by house arrest for a term of six months to two years or imprisonment for a term of two to four years. The second part aggravates liability where the same act was committed against two or more persons — such an act is punished by imprisonment for a term of three to five years. As you can see, the law provides no fine here: the penalty begins with house arrest and ends with five years of imprisonment.
What Distinguishes Negligence from Intent
Negligence means that the person did not intend the consequence: they either did not foresee the result of their act, or believed the result would not occur, or did not think of it at all — although with due care they should have foreseen it. This subjective side is the defense’s main field of work: if the person could not have foreseen the consequence in the concrete circumstances, their act cannot be assessed as causing death by negligence. In medical cases this is even more complex, because the outcome of treatment depends not only on the physician’s conduct but also on the course of the disease, the patient’s individual condition and many other factors.
The structure of both parts shows clearly what the penalty depends on: the basic composition addresses the death of one person, while the same act committed against two or more persons moves to the second part and places the case in a stricter frame. Such situations are often connected with technical accidents, construction incidents or fires, where a single carelessness costs several lives. The defense then separately verifies the causal link toward each victim — a common fact does not yet mean that every consequence was caused by exactly the accused’s conduct.
How the Defense Approaches Such Cases
The defense’s first task is to challenge the causal link: a comprehensive medical expert examination must answer whether the death was the result of exactly the medical intervention or omission, or whether it was the natural development of the disease. The second is the assessment of foreseeability: if the clinical picture was atypical and even an experienced physician could not have interpreted it correctly, the concept of negligence is not fulfilled. The third is procedural performance: the role of auxiliary staff, the technical equipment of the institution, the factor of time — each of these circumstances redistributes liability. The fourth is the quality of the expert examination: the experts’ qualifications, the substantiation of the conclusions and the completeness of the materials must always be re-verified; where necessary, the defense requests an independent or repeated forensic medical examination. The rules of investigation and expert examination are governed by the norms of the Code and other laws, and their violation is an instrument of the defense.
A boundary without which such a case cannot be understood is the difference between a complication and negligence. Treatment always carries risk: known complications, individual reactions, an unpredictable course of disease. In each case these facts must be separated from the acts that contradicted the medical standard. The defense builds exactly this demarcation: it compares the intervention performed with the approaches existing in the field, verifies whether the choice was substantiated, and shows where the objective limits of medicine end and human conduct begins.
The chronology of the case matters just as much. Everything in such cases begins with the medical documentation: the anamnesis, notes, diagnostic results, prescriptions and their execution. Gaps in the documentation are a two-edged instrument: they may be presented in favor of the prosecution, but often they prove precisely that the physician acted within the bounds of the information available. The defense therefore independently orders the documentation and compares the sequence of events with the content of the records, so that a complete and impartial picture of the case is restored.
How Legal.ge Can Help
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