If I recall correctly, there’s another issue in the OP’s hypo: whether it’s possible to have a conspiracy where only one party actually agrees to the crime. The undercover cop obviously is not planning to actually carry out the hit. Jurisdictions vary on whether this will suffice for a conspiracy charge.
There’s also attempted murder. The Illinois law begins with the following. Note the bit about impossibility.
“(720 ILCS 5/8-4) (from Ch. 38, par. 8-4)
Sec. 8-4. Attempt.
(a) Elements of the offense.
A person commits the offense of attempt when, with intent to commit a specific offense, he or she does any act that constitutes a substantial step toward the commission of that offense.
(b) Impossibility.
It is not a defense to a charge of attempt that because of a misapprehension of the circumstances it would have been impossible for the accused to commit the offense attempted.”
It certainly would be redundant, but that’s probably not a criminal offense.
As I said above, you have to have reason to think your crime could be committed. So you might believe you can kill Harry Potter but, by definition, you can’t have reason to think you can. Your belief is inherently unreasonable.
Okay, then assume I have reason to believe Harry Potter is real. You can have reason to believe–maybe even good reason to believe–something false, after all. There are plenty of false beliefs which aren’t inherently unreasonable to hold.
Yeah, Harry Potter is a bad example, because in my opinion (and I think it would be shared by law enforcement), the fact that you think HP is real is pretty good evidence that you are indeed crazy.
Now, for a better example, let’s say you’re having an on-line affair with someone (who you’ve never met in person), and for some reason you get angry enough to hire someone to have them killed. Unbeknownst to you, it was all a joke on you, with a bunch of people taking turns pretending to be your on-line sweetie, with a made-up name, fictional place of residence, etc. Is that attempted murder?
Agree with all of the above. The fact that your wife is already dead is no different than the fact that the “hitman” is an undercover cop so there was no real contract or conspiracy. It’s further no different than if it was a real hitman, but HE suffered a heart attack and died before he could shoot your wife.
This type of offense is an intent crime and you can’t cry “no harm, no foul”: You reasonably thought that you were agreeing to kill a live human being. That’s the crime even if the circumstances later turned out to make your attempt futile.
Any attempt to hire a hit man to kill Harry Potter would call your sanity into question, and the same with Ronald Reagan. But I suppose, if the prosecutor could show that you’ve been living in a hippy compound, cut off from communication for the past 8 years, and further did no research before hiring a hit man to kill a dead guy…it’s unlikely, but there could be a set of circumstances where you could be convicted of conspiring to kill Ronald Reagan.
Yes, it is. John Doe is the target of your hit.
It would have to be really unusual circumstances for you to have a reasonable belief that Harry Potter was real. I can’t imagine such a scenario.
But here’s a somewhat similar situation. Let’s say you’ve met a woman, you’ve fallen in love, and you ask her to marry you. She begins crying and tells you the secret she’s been keeping from you. She’s already married and her husband won’t agree to a divorce. So while she loves you, she can’t marry you.
You decide on a secret plan of your own. You contact a hitman and hire him to kill her husband. Once he’s dead, your girlfriend will be free to marry you. You hand over the cash and the “hitman” pulls out his badge and arrests you. He’s actually an undercover cop.
Then the dramatic twist. As the evidence is being collected for the trial, it’s discovered your girlfriend lied to you about being married. She just told you she had a husband because she doesn’t want to marry you.
In this case, you were trying to murder a person who, like Harry Potter, never existed. But unlike Harry Potter, it was reasonable for you to think your victim existed. So you could be convicted of committing a real attempt at murder even though the murder itself couldn’t have been carried out.