Quote ="Albion"There was nothing accidental about it. He illegally tackles O'Brien and it was only because of that illegal challenge he whips his head into a team-mate. '"
Whoah there, cowboy. Calm down.
Let's look at the contact of the head with his team-mates arm. What are the possibilities?
(a) it was accidental
(b) the tackler was reckless as to whether it would happen
(c) the tackler deliberately made it happen.
(d) it was an Act of God
We can immediately rule out (c) and (d).
To be reckless as to whether something may happen, it is necessary to know that there is a real risk it will happen, yet decide to ignore that risk. Now I have the feeling you may insist on disagreeing, but I don't think the tackler, or anyone, could reasonably have predicted even that the head would "whiplash" , much less that it would do so into a solid part of an other player in just such a way as to knock him out.
So plainly, it follows that the only reasonable conclusion is the injury was indeed (a) - an accident.
Quote ="Albion"Taylor should be culpable for the consequences of the tackle. '"
Your choice of phrasing is disingenuous, but I'm afraid you aren't getting away with it. You use the word "culpable", which means "deserving of blame". Therefore your proposition actually says:
Quote Taylor should be deserving of blame for the consequences of the tackle. '"
But this is meaningless. I am either deserving of blame, or I am not. It is an either/or. There is no "should" about it.
Quote ="Albion"If you punch someone (an offence in itself) and they wack their head on the pavement when falling over as a result of that punch, do you not think that they are responsible for that? Extreme example, I know. '"
How confused you are. Yes, it is reasonably foreseeable that if I punch somebody so hard that they fall to ground, they may hit their head on the pavement. So yes, in general I am probably responsible for that (though there are possible reasons why I might not be). But it is not what you mean to ask, is it? Your subtext, which we are supposed to instinctively divine, is "... and they wack (sic) their head on the pavement
which causes death". I presume that must be what you want us to think, since a bump on the head would ordinarily be less significant than the original punch. That is a topic which is wholly irrelevant here as (a) no-one died (or was even significantly injured) and (b) manslaughter is a one-off topic all on its own, and is only so because of the obvious and irreconcileable conflict that exists between punishing a person for what they have actually done, not unintended consequences, on the one hand, yet marking the gravity of another person's death on the other hand. This is something that has exercised courts and judicial systems for centuries and still does. Rather than go off topic let me just point you to one article that you may like to read which summarises the issues:
[url=http://www.barristermagazine.com/archive-articles/issue-45/although-the-ministry-of-justice-has-spent-the-last-two-years-reviewing-homicide-law,-there-still-remains-a-serious-problem-around-%E2%80%9Cone-punch-killers%E2%80%9D-which-means-punishment-for-bad-luck.htmlOne punch killers[/url
In context, and keeping things in at least some proportion, a player is held to account for the consequences
of what he did but, rightly, not for unintended and completely unforeseeable things which he neither did, noir intended, nor could remotely have foreseen.
And which is exactly the point made by the RFL disciplinary, which I quoted, above.
