THERE'S SURELY NO DOUBT that the manslaughter verdict delivered last week in the death of a teen-aged rugby player was the correct one.

After all, a conviction for manslaughter does not require any intent to kill or even to cause serious injury that leads to death. All the Crown needs to prove beyond reasonable doubt was that the accused committed an assault which resulted in death.

And it's because death can sometimes result from even minor assaults that our Criminal Code permits the widest conceivable scope of punishment — everything from a suspended sentence to a life sentence, involving incarceration for at least seven years.

Following a two-week trial, Justice Bruce Duncan was left with little choice but to reject a defence contention that the 18-year-old accused had been acting in self defence when he slammed 15-year-old Manny Castillo's unprotected head to the ground in the dying moments of a high school rugby game in Mississauga two years ago.

The convicted teen, a major junior hockey player, will return to court July 6 for his sentencing hearing at which he could face sentencing as an adult and disclosure of his identity, which now remains protected by the Youth Criminal Justice Act.

In rendering his decision, Justice Duncan rejected the self-defence claim that the accused player only pushed his opponent to the ground to get out of a choking headlock.

"The defendant intentionally applied force that was outside the rules of the game or any standard by which the game is played," the judge said. "Manny did not explicitly consent to that force. I'm satisfied beyond any doubt no consent can be implied."

Accordingly, the defendant had committed an assault, an unlawful act that had caused death.

The judge described what the defendant did as being a "sucker tackle" and said at its "highest" it was done out of retaliation, not self defence.

The evidence showed the teenager died from a serious head injury a few days after the incident.

As is invariably the case in criminal trials, all the attention was devoted to the cause of death and what actually happened, with no need for the trier of fact to look beyond the case at bar to any contributing factors in the death, such as whether the life might have been saved by speedier medical attention.

Such things remain the prerogative of the coroner's inquest and the jurors who are asked not only to find what caused the death but also to recommend how similar deaths might be prevented in future.

As we see it, this is classically a case where there ought to be an inquest, at which one question to be addressed is whether high school rugby players should be required to use some form of protective headgear.

Certainly, in a society where once you'd never see a helmeted lacrosse or hockey player and where even child bicyclists were seldom seen wearing a helmet, head protections have become not just customary but mandatory.

Although we seldom read of serious injuries from high school rugby games, let alone deaths, relatively inexpensive rugby helmets are being marketed and researchers in Australia have concluded that with some improvements such helmets would prevent concussions.

In the light of the continuing debated about the performance of protective headgear for rugby players, a study was carried out by three members of the School of Safety Science at the University of New South Wales in Sydney.

The objective was to examine the impact of foam being incorporated into headgear. Tests on polyethylene foam indicated that an increase in thickness from 10 mm to 16 mm would improve headgear performance. The tests showed that significant reductions in headform acceleration could be achieved with small design changes, but formal field studies would be needed to show how much the changes would reduce the rate or severity of concussions.

As we see it, the situation here is not unlike the fatal skiing accident that befell Natasha Richardson at Mont Tremblant earlier this year.

There, too, there was no rule requiring skiers to wear helmets and fatal skiing accidents are a relative rarity and fatalities from head injuries even more so.

However, the idea of requiring helmets for both skiers and rugby players shouldn't strike anyone as outlandish in an era when we require 15-year-olds to wear helmets while bicycling even on bike paths well removed from vehicular traffic and when use of seatbelts has long been mandatory even in rural areas where the risks of personalinjury accidents is relatively low.

Even if rugby helmets of the type now available wouldn't prevent the possibility of occasional concussions, they would surely reduce the seriousness of any injury and make it far less likely there will be a recurrence of the tragedy that led to the manslaughter conviction.