It’s 2.30 and I just dropped off my wife at the mall. Apropos nothing, at 2.45 I decide to have my wife killed, so I make some calls and drive to meet a guy to arrange the details. Our conversation begins at 3 and ends at 3.15 with his arresting me (he was an undercover cop, see?).
Unbeknownst to me, at 2.32 my wife died in the mall as a result of an undiagnosed heart condition.
Can I be charged with soliciting a murder of someone who’s dead?
Change the example. The year is 2013. Instead of my wife, I’m trying to find someone who’ll off Ronald Reagan, whom I don’t know is dead (make up for yourself why this is, just don’t make me crazy in so doing). Can I be charged?
I should clean up my question. Of course I can be charged in either case. I can be charged with anything. The real question is, in either case is the fact that the person was dead gonna help me in court?
Yeah, conspiracy to commit murder. Doesn’t someone have to be alive for me to conspire to murder them? Is it conspiracy to commit murder if I put a hit out on Hawkeye Pierce from MAS*H?
Let’s assume the cop knows not to effect an arrest until the overt act requirement is satisfied; he doesn’t haul out the bracelets until you pass over the cash.
Conspiracy is then complete.
And if you’re interested – suppose you’re more of a do-it-yourself guy. So you take your hunting rifle up to Nordstrom’s, hide in the Yves St Laurent sweater section, and sight your scope on your wife across the way in Starbucks. You shoot, hitting her head, in what would be a kill shot except for the fact that her heart condition killed her ten minutes prior.
You’re guilty of another inchoate crime: attempted murder.
In Ankh Morpork, Patrician Vetinari has decreed that anyone who assaults someone else so badly that the victim needs medical treatment by an Igor to survive will be found guilty of Murder.
It means that Ranger Jeff has escaped from the Watch. The populace should be warned: he is armed and has good taste in literature (in this case, Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series).
Under UK law, the crime of conspiracy is just defined to be when people agree to pursue a course of action that would result in a crime. (It’s a one-size-fits-all kind of thing — things like “conspiracy to murder”, “conspiracy to defraud”, etc. aren’t separate crimes.) Notably, the law specifically says that even if you didn’t know the crime was impossible to commit in the manner you planned, you’re still guilty of conspiracy (bolding mine):
(I remember this from discussions about the liquid bomb plot a few years back. It wasn’t really clear whether the plan to manufacture explosives in flight would have actually worked, but that question was immaterial to whether the plotters were guilty of conspiracy.)
Your intent was based upon your knowledge at-hand, therefore the conspiracy to commit murder was real. You would be arrested and charged. As prosecution, the testimony of the cop doing the deal with you, as well as your admission that you wanted her dead should be enough.
You may honestly be able to get the fact that she was dead at the time omitted from the case, due to the fact that it wasn’t relevant at the time of the transaction.
Or another example. You take your gun and shoot somebody in the heart. Unbeknownst to you, the person is wearing a bulletproof vest. So it was impossible for you to kill the person with the act you committed. But any reasonable jury is going to say that your intent was to commit murder and that you had reason to believe your act would result in murder.
Same thing with the OP. You’re trying to have your wife killed. Two things unknown to you prevent you from succeeding; your wife is already dead and the hitman you’re hiring is actually an undercover policeman.
As for the overt act, hiring somebody you believe is a hitman would qualify.
The OP posited a situation where someone is charged with murder for attempting to murder someone who is already dead. I offered a contrary situation where someone would be charged with murder where the victim is still alive. So, someone is charged with murder for killing a dead person or for not killing someone.
I respectfully submit that although my comment was on a tangent, it was not a complete non-sequitur.
What if the impossibility arises not from the fact that the person is dead, but from the fact that they don’t (and never did) exist? Can I get convicted for trying to set up a hit on Harry Potter? Assume that I’m not crazy, I just don’t realize HP isn’t real.