You attempted to commit murder, but the target survives. To protect the target, they are declared legally dead for their own safety and are given a new identity. If you are then charged with the crime, would you be charged with Attempted Murder or Murder?
Which country’s & state’s or province’s laws apply? The answer will be different in Connecticut vs. in Botswana.
Who is the “they” who magically override the laws and make a live person legally dead and re-identified?
US Marshalls, FBI and US Witness protection
I blackmail the President into making everything go away. That’s how it works when the Powers That Be declare someone dead in order to disappear them after I try to kill them and end up legally murdering them.
People put into witness protection are not declared legally dead. They are given new identities and relocated. When called to testify, they identify themselves under their original name.
They say they are a supreme court judge , who didn’t see their attacker. The next day, the front page of every newspaper in the country reads
" SUPREME COURT JUSTICE ASSASSINATED IN PLANNED SLAYING"
Then what?
I think this may have to be moved out of GQ, as it doesn’t seem to have enough connection to real-world facts…
Well, gee-if they tried the guy for attempted murder, don’t you think that would give away the fact that he was still alive?
Happened in Law and Order
The President nominates a replacement justice. The Senate Judiciary Committee holds hearings to examine the fitness of the nominee, followed by a vote on whether the full Senate wishes to confirm the replacement justice.
So what? I thought you wanted to know what happens in real life?
Presumably, to try someone for a crime, they need to be in custody. I don’t know if American courts ever convict people in absentia.
If it were someone like a Supreme Court justice, they have body guards from, I believe, the US Marshal’s Service.
Outside of bad fiction, I don’t believe that anyone has been declared dead when the government knew them to be alive.
Yes. Wouldn’t it be a false arrest and all charges would be dismissed?
The OP still hasn’t answered my question about jurisdiction. He’s narrowed it down to the US, which leaves us with about 55 possibilities for choice of law. In almost all cases murder is a state crime, not a Federal one.
Well, he did say Supreme Court justice, so the jurisdiction in that case would be federal.
Moderator Action
This is a little too hypothetical for GQ. Let’s move it to IMHO, our home for legal (and other) opinions.
Moving thread from General Questions to In My Humble Opinion.
Ok then lets just day it was the prosecuter like in svu.
“svu”??
Isn’t “legally murdered” an oxymoron? Isn’t murder when you kill someone illegally?
People in the witness protection program are not declared legally dead. So there’s that.
Now, in your hypothetical Special Law Victims Order Unit episode. This Supreme Court Justice raped your daughter, so you vow revenge. You shoot the bastard on the steps on the courthouse, he’s rushed to a hospital, you’re arrested. Then the Men in Black falsely declare that the Justice died, and move him to a new secret hospital under an assumed name. The DA charges you with murder.
Now what?
The problem with this is, what’s the motivation for the Men in Black to say the Justice died, and give him a new identity? What’s in it for them? To protect him? That’s nonsensical. If they pretend he’s dead, he can’t be Justice anymore, and he’s eating egg noodles with ketchup, an average nobody, and gets to live the rest of his life like a schnook.
If we want to postulate cabals of Men in Black who do stuff like this, we can just postulate that the judge and the DA are in on it, and they can charge you and convict you of anything they want, evidence be damned. Or you just disappear. Whether you go to prison for murder, or go to prison because they planted kiddie pron on your computer, or you disappear, or you walk free all depends on their n-dimensional chess plans, not what you actually did or didn’t do.
But if we’re talking about the real world, in the real world they don’t declare people in the witness protection program legally dead. In the real world, you’d be charged with attempted murder, because the guy you tried to kill was still alive. And if they needed to, he could testify at your trial and say, “There’s the guy who shot me” as himself. Just like Henry Hill could testify against his mob buddies even though he was in the witness protection program. The witness protection program doesn’t mean that the Judge looks at Henry Hill’s new fake ID and says that he’s not really Henry Hill anymore and so can’t testify against the mob anymore.
Also in the real world, charging someone with murder when there’s on body is really very difficult. What’s the evidence that you killed them? If the real world scenario is that you shot a guy, and he ran off and hid somewhere, and the cops think he probably died because he got shot a lot of times and disappeared, but he’s actually alive and in hiding, you might get charged with murder. But your defense attorney has some powerful arguments on your behalf. Yes, people get charged with murder when there’s no body. But it’s hard. This is why mobsters and people committing fictional perfect crimes go to lengths to dispose of the body. The problem with disposing of the body is that you might get caught doing so. So there’s the other mob tactic of shooting the guy and dropping the murder weapon at the scene and walking away.