A couple of legal scenarios I was pondering last night:
[ul]
[li]Jack intends to murder Kevin, and so slips some cyanide into Kevin’s food, but it’s Amy who inadvertently eats Kevin’s food instead and nearly dies as a result. Kevin is unharmed. Is Jack guilty of the attempted murder of Kevin, or Amy? What would he be charged with?[/li][li]Alternatively, say Jack sets fire to Kevin’s house with the intention of killing him, but Kevin just so happens to not be at home at that moment and so escapes death. Would Jack only be charged with arson if he keeps his mouth shut about his real motive for starting the fire?[/li][/ul]
Premeditated, intentional attempted homicide of Amy. Intent follows the poison:
Keeping your mouth shut would be a good strategy here, given that factual impossibility is not a good defense (that is, claiming you’re not guilty because the crime was factually, physically impossible to commit) at least when it comes to things like murder and rape. For example, if you shoot through your ceiling to try to kill someone who was upstairs but is no longer, you’re still guilty of attempted murder.
How well that strategy would work is another discussion.
This seems very odd and illogical to me. I don’t understand why both the intent and the results aren’t taken into account.
I’m not a lawyer, but it seems straightforward to me that Jack is now guilty of two completely separate crimes: attempted first-degree murder of Kevin, AND criminal negligence towards Amy.
The crime against the person actually damaged should be lesser than the crime against the person who was only intended to be damaged?
Transferred intent is a legal fiction that arose historically to deal with a perceived injustice in situations where A intends to shoot and kill B but ends up killing C instead. Under common law A would be guilty of two crimes: attempted murder of A and some sort of lesser crime of homicide of C short of murder (because there was no intent to kill C, there could be no murder under common law). Without the doctrine of transferred intent, A could only be charged with these two lesser crimes, which even when combined were “less serious” than murder. As this result was viewed as unjust to the victim (person C), the idea of transferred intent was developed to properly punish A.
IANA(Criminal)L, so I can’t speak of how modern criminal law statutes in the various jurisdictions deal with these scenarios. But transferred intent is very much a history legal fiction that doesn’t necessarily have to make sense or be logical. In fact, transferred intent in the area of torts (as opposed to criminal law) has pretty much been done away with (e.g., Palsgraf).
Ah, perfect, thanks!