I am putting this in GQ because I think it will be possible to factually answer. However, it may not have one. If this is the case then people can debate it over in GD.
A friend of mine who is in law school passed along this legal question to me. It is from one of his exams.
Hank plans a trek through the desert.
Albert, intending to kill Hank, puts poison into his canteen.
Gary also intends to kill Hank but has no idea what Albert has been up to. He punctures Hank’s canteen and Hank dies of thirst.
Who has caused Hank’s death?
Could it be Albert? How could it be, since Hank never swallowed the poison? Could it be Gary? How could it be, since he only deprived Hank of some poisoned water that would have killed him more swiftly even than thirst? Was it neither? But if neither had done anything, Hank would still be alive. So who killed Hank?
I remember a law and order episode using the analogy of a man falling from the top of a building. I shoot out my window and into his heart killing him. This makes me a murderer despite the fact that he was about to die (splat) soon anyway. Using this logic does this mean that Gary killed Hank? If so, what would Albert be guilty of? Attempted murder, certainly, I would think.
I think you’re right. Gary killed Hank; he caused him to die of thirst, and it’s immaterial that he would have died from something else had he not. Albert is guilty of attempted murder.
I agree with pravnik. If Hank were seconds of dying from thirst, and his water bottle had not been punctured, he could have drank the poisoned water and it would have sustained his life by quenching his thirst. Even if it were for only a few seconds, he still would have lasted longer than if he had no water at all. Therefore the first cause of his death would have been (and was) the lack of water.
Gary is guilty of murder. Using the logic that he was going to die, of poison, anyway is like saying it is OK to kill him because he was going to die, of old age, anyway. So there!
It was not definite that he was going to die anyway. He could have been saved by various means, including a net. In fact, I believe the episode you cited involved having a net to save his life. Perhaps he would have died. But maybe not. The fact is that the bullet killed him.
Your protagonist may have died from the poison, but perhaps not. Perhaps he built up an immunity to the poison. In any event, the poison was in water which he needed. Perhaps the poison may have killed him. Perhaps not. We cannot conjecture on possibilities, but only rely on the facts.
I remember this one, except the way the hypothetical worked was as follows:
Three people hate V. D1 puts poison in V’s water bottle. D2 empties water bottle and fills it with sand. D3 cuts small hole in water bottle so it leaks. V, an explorer, goes off into desert and dies of thirst. Can all three Ds be convicted of murder?
And you’re right, Debaser, there is a but for causation problem: none of the three Ds are but for causes of V’s death. We can certainly say that all three are guilty of attempted murder, since causing the result isn’t an element of the offense of attempted murder.
There was a real case somewhat similar to this hypothetical. In People v. Arzon, Arzon started a fire on the 5th floor of a building. Firefighters respond to the fire. Meanwhile, an unidentified 2nd arsonist, B, starts a fire on the 2nd floor while one of the firefighters is still in the building fighting the first fire. The court treated this as a case of concurrent causation, and upheld Arzon’s murder conviction. Generally speaking, the doctrine of concurrent causation holds that when two independent causes in fact occur at the same time, and either of them would have caused the result by itself, both factors are deemed to have factually caused the result, even though neither was a but for cause of the result.
Now I don’t want to get this thread kicked over to GD unnecessarily, but this hypothetical raises the general question of why we even care about the results when imposing criminal liability. All three Ds are equally culpable in that they all three tried to kill V, so why differentiate between them. Now suppose that V lived somehow – an off-course caravan finds him and gives him water just barely in time to save V’s life. Why should we then still not punish the three Ds for murder?
Off the top of my head, I can think of two reasons not to ignore the result when meting out the punishment:
The perhaps irrational intuition that results have moral significance.
Results have evidentiary significance. They show us how dangerous the person is. Can we really say a reckless driver who doesn’t kill anyone is as dangerous as a reckless driver who doesn’t? Thus, even utilitarians (who I posit would be more inclined to ignore results than retributivists) wouldn’t equate these two drivers.
