Law and Order: Special Victims Unit (one of the variants of the television show).
If you attempted to commit murder, but the target survives, that’s attempted murder. Not sure what else you’re asking here.
A similar question, and more realistic, is if you angrily pushed someone off a cliff during an argument and nobody could find a body. I assume nobody could call it murder if it can’t be proved they died. If you were prosecuted for attempted murder then they found the body a year later they probably couldn’t charge you again thanks to double jeopardy.
Yes, they need to prove the victim died. If you push a guy off a cliff, and he falls out of sight that could be enough for the jury to conclude that the guy you pushed off a cliff is dead.
That the victim is dead is an element of the crime of murder. The jury has to decide that the victim is dead, beyond a reasonable doubt. A very simple way for the prosecution to do this is to produce the dead body of the victim. That particular element of the crime is now established. With no body the prosecution needs other evidence that will convince the jury. Eyewitness testimony that they saw the victim go over the cliff into the river and was never found after extensive search and rescue could be enough. Or testimony that Bob screamed he was going to murder his wife, and then he went home, and his wife was never seen or heard from again.
The exact method of establishing that the victim is in fact dead is up to the prosecution, and it’s up to the jury to decide whether the death has been proven beyond a reasonable doubt. In situations where there’s no body but there’s enough evidence to charge the defendant with attempted murder, establishing that the victim is indeed dead shouldn’t be too hard. All the elements that prove that the defendant is guilty of attempted murder, which we’ve stipulated are present, then all that is needed is to prove that the victim is actually dead. The elements that prove that the attempted murder took place, plus the fact that the victim has disappeared, should be enough to establish that the victim is dead.
The real problem with a murder case with no body is establishing all the other stuff. If you have a video tape of me hitting the victim on the head, and then dragging the victim off camera, and then the victim is never found again, that could be enough. The fact that the victim was never seen again after I hit him on the head could be enough (if the jury believes it) to show that I killed him. Sure, my defense attorney could argue that after I hit the victim and dragged him out of sight, he woke up, and we shook hands and parted friends, and then the victim told me he was changing his name and moving to Florida, and so I should be charged with attempted murder but not murder. Can you prove it DIDN’T HAPPEN? Yes, actually you can. The jury is certainly capable of not believing my testimony, and finding that the doubt about the victim’s death is unreasonable. And when if I testify about my version of events the prosecution gets to cross examine me, which opens up a gigantic can of worms.
In any case, establishing that the victim is dead is one element of the case, it needs to be proven beyond a reasonable doubt to a jury, but this is possible by methods other than pointing to the dead body of the victim.
But what if the aggressor gets pregnant before the attempted murder? Will the murdered-not-murdered person be required to pay child support?
To have someone declared legally dead, you have to make an application to the court. For that to succeed in this stupid hypothetical, you’d have to have government officials conspiring to put a fraud on the court, by swearing to a fact that they know is not true, ie that the target is dead.
And, even if someone is erroneously declared dead, that doesn’t mean that they’re an un-person, not protected by the law. If someone intentionally kills another person, that’s murder.
In Australia, a man was charged with five murders, based on maps the defendant drew, obtained by an informant, to which the defendant admitted murdering the five people. During the trial, one of the murder victims, Natasha Ryan, who had been missing for 5 years, and had never had her body discovered, was found alive, immediately aborting the murder trial.
In Law and Order SVU, ADA Cabot has an assassination attempt made on her. She is taken to hospital, and the next day the front page of the newspaper reports that she has been ‘slain’. That night, detectives Benson and Stabler go unknowingly and see that ADA Cabot is alive.
A year later, a bullet found in another crime matches the one that was used in “an unsolved homicide, of ADA Cabot”. On the way to arraignment, the witness to the murder that made the link between the cases has an assassination attempt made on his life, and as such, they are 15 minutes late to the arraignment, and the judge has no choice but to let defendant Connors out on bail, who is wanted by the FBI CIA and dozens of countries around the world.
As Connors will surely flee the country, ADA Novak tells Benson and Stabler, the only two people apart from witness protection who are aware that she is alive, to arrest Connors for ADA Cabot’s murder. As they are in open court, they can’t tell ADA Novak that Cabot is alive. At the arraignment for ADA Cabot’s murder, the murder case is withdrawn, with Defense Attorney Kressler demanding that Novak stop throwing bogus charges at his client to keep him in prison. She replaces the charge of murder with the charge of Attempted murder, and presents ADA Cabot alive, shocking everyone including the judge. Kressler immediately demands that Benson and Stabler be arrested for perjury and false arrest, which the judge denies mainly because Kressler’s request is disgraceful under the circumstances.
What I’m asking is would the same charge of attempted murder need to be applied to someone who is legally dead, but alive under another identity, and if the above happened, would the detectives be charged with perjury and false arrest?
As an aside note: You joined today and started three threads about hypothetical legal cases. Are participants in your thread helping you write a screenplay, or are we accessories in helping you hide a body, possibly off the coast of Brownsville on the boundary of US/Mexican territorial waters?
Yes, it sometimes happens that people are charged and sometimes convicted for murder, and then the supposed victim turns up alive and well. Embarrassing. The point is, you can charge someone for murder without a body, you just have to convince 12 jurors that the victim is dead, beyond a reasonable doubt.
As for the convoluted TV plot you mention, the problem is that in real life people in the witness protection program aren’t declared legally dead. And in real life, if a key witness can’t make it to court because of X or Y, the lawyers can use their words and talk to the judge. “Judge, the witness was just shot at, can we get a continuance, or whatever the term is that I forget from law school?”
And yes, if you testify that something is true that you know not to be true, that is called perjury. So yes, if you’re a cop and you testify that so-and-so is dead, and you know they are alive, you’ve committed perjury, which is a serious crime. This is why in real life people aren’t declared legally dead in the witness protection program, since this would require people to testify that the supposed dead person is actually dead, which would be perjury.
If in the case of someone who actually shot someone, and the cops actually thought the person died, and charged the guy with murder, but then the victim shows up alive, then yes, they could change the charge to attempted murder, if attempted murder still fit the facts of the case with the new information that the victim isn’t actually dead. If they really were shot at by the defendant, then attempted murder it is.
But no, you’re not secretly declared dead by the witness protection program. That’s fiction.
And if the defendant really is wanted by dozens of other jurisdictions for other crimes, they can use their words and tell the judge they want the guy. Or just arrest him themselves as he walks out of the courtroom. Happens all the time that people are cleared of one particular crime and are immediately charged with five or six other ones, you don’t have to let them walk outside before you can arrest htem again.
None of that kicks in until after your trial as a general rule.
The newspaper sells a lot of copies?
Not the greatest source in the world.
My Google-fu failed me but people have been “declared dead” in a pretend sense during investigations as a sort of protection/protective custody aide. Cops gathered all the evidence they need, the suspect is arrested, victim is revealed alive for the trial. I know the series of episodes on SVU you are referring to and I can find no actual case that ever was handled like that. I doubt very much in the US that it would even be possible.
I’m not sure what connection you are making with the Natasha Ryan case to your present hypothetical. (If you are interested, you can read the court judgment about the case here.)
Ryan disappeared so far as family were concerned, but she was in fact hiding out with her boyfriend, of whom her family disapproved. Fraser (the accused) had no involvement in her disappearance at all, so obviously no attempted murder charge was appropriate.
That is not at all the same thing as an elaborate pretence by the authorities that someone is dead.
I am not sure that “declared legally dead” means what you think it means. A false statement to the media that someone is dead is of no legal consequence. The process whereby a person can be declared dead after being missing for 7 years (your jurisdiction’s mileage may vary) is largely about estate transfer. If the missing person turns up after their estate has been distributed, that causes bureaucratic and other difficulties, but it is not as though the living person is somehow treated as a corpse.
If a person is charged with murder of someone who turns out not to be dead, then they can’t be convicted of murder. Even if the authorities wanted to pretend someone was dead to give them a more secure new life, they would have to lift the veil of that charade if for some reason it became necessary to do so, and a person’s being wrongly charged with murder would be obviously a very good reason.
Although sometimes truth can be weirder than fiction. See:
“No, You’re Still Deceased,” Judge Tells Dead Man – Lowering the Bar followed by
Feds Say Legally Dead Is Slightly Alive – Lowering the Bar and finally
Legally Dead Man Sentenced to Be Actually Dead – Lowering the Bar