I'm replying to the post on 30 November from Taildragger, who appears to be a lawyer also.
The more I look at the law in SA and the UK -- which make a useful comparison -- the more confused I become. Remember that I'm like all academics: one starts one's career confident that one knows a little about everything, and one ends it 35 or so years later uneasily aware that one might possibly have learned a great deal about almost nothing and unsure whether one knows anything useful at all.
One of the things that has become clear is that the form the law takes varies greatly from country to country, and this includes the presence or absence of references to the state of mind (the mens rea) of the person accused. In South Africa, there is no reference at all in Civil Aviation Regulation 91.01.10 to any state of mind, but the Constitution's Bill of Rights has been interpreted to deal with that very effectively and wisely, and the regulation is thus terse, clear and I like it.
By comparison, the ANO (under which Capt. Stewart was prosecuted) formulates the law very differently in the UK, as I tried to explain in a paper I wrote some years ago. Reference is made to recklessness and negligence, but what the words mean I won't even begin to explain. I thought in 1996 that the UK law was a mess. The explanation why I think this is boring lawyers' law. As they say, those who claim to know the answer obviously don't understand the problem.
I have not looked at the law closely in other jurisdictions, but it is clear when one looks at the reported instances of prosecutions of airline pilots that there are huge differences which involve not only the definitions of the offences but the procedures by which they are dealt with.
When I'm a passenger I trust the guys in front because they're well-trained, and there's at least two of them who don't entirely trust each other and act accordingly.