Have been a foreman on a murder trial jury there is one very good reason to have an attempted murder charge. Some poeople on sitting in the jury box have a problem with a murder conviction even when the victim is dead. Trying to convict for murder when the victim is sitting in court watching the procedings would cause their heads to explode.
IMHO chargine someone with manslaughter for dropping a bananna peel on the sidewalk is just a bit extreme don’t ya think? Also that would lead to a littering charge and a littering / manslaughter charge depending on what was dropped. So you get 20 years for dropping a bananna peel, but a $50 fine for dropping a piece of paper. Now that makes no sense.
Also wouldn’t that run afoul of the cruel and unusual punishment part of the constitution?
If it is all the same to you, I will keep our current system imperfect as it may be.
You used this phrase for several of the theories, and I don’t understand what it means. Theories don’t prove anything, but if they did, how could they prove too much? Would you define the term, please?
Close, but not quite. Driving safely with a BAC of 0.03% while drinking a beer (or soda pop) is perfectly legal in Montana, so they invented a brand-new law to give them an excuse for stopping you when you’re not doing anything wrong. In fact, a non-drinker with a 0% BAC could be busted for having an opened bottle of whiskey in the passenger’s seat even if the driver has never had a drink in his life and none of that whiskey was consumed in or around that vehicle.
Right, I get that. I’m irritated at what seemed like an apparent justification of a law that basically says “well, he’s not actually doing anything wrong, so we need to write a different law to bust him”
Forgive me for speaking loosely. Allow me to clarify:
By theory, in this case, I was referring to the various theories used to justify punishing crime. While they don’t “prove” anything, they have logical implications, which is what I was referring to.
I thought it was clear from the context what I meant. E.g., “this theory proves too much. If we merely seek to deter others from committing crimes, why limit punishment to the guilty? And why limit it to punishment that is not cruel or unusual[?] Wouldn’t these be the best deterrents?” When I say that, I mean that the implications of the arument exceed the practices it seeks to justify and might actually contradict current practices.
Compare, “But the argument proves too much. If it were sound, the legislature might validly command that the finding of an indictment, or mere proof of the identity of the accused, should create a presumption f the existence of all the facts essential to guilt. This is not permissible.” http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/cgi-bin/getcase.pl?court=us&vol=319&invol=463 (Justice Roberts) and
It occurred to me that the answers so far have missed a large portion of the issue here. What the OP was really asking about, IMO, is a concept called moral luck.
The philosphical question raised is whether a lucky (or unlucky) break requires us to view a volitional act differently.
This is a good article on moral luck and punishment.
Here are some good general discussions of the concept of moral luck, its implications, and its interaction with various kinds of moral theory.