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Attempting to murder someone is still attempted murder, even if it was impossible for the attempt to succeed. Let’s say you and I both want to kill Bob. I snea
by philwelch 7y ago
Attempting to murder someone is still attempted murder, even if it was impossible for the attempt to succeed.
Let’s say you and I both want to kill Bob. I sneak into his bedroom at night and smother him to death with a pillow. Bob is now dead and I sneak away—I have committed murder. Shortly afterwards, you sneak into his bedroom and shoot him multiple times with a gun. In this scenario, you are guilty of attempted murder even though the intended victim was already dead, unbeknownst to you.
Many stings rely on similar principles. People who steal bait cars don’t actually succeed in stealing the car, nor do johns who solicit streetwalking undercover cops succeed in buying sexual favors from them.
- megous 7y agoThat's something different. Here you'd be charging someone based on what they thought during the act, and not on what they did or attempted to do.
- RHSeeger 7y agoNot really. The murderer thought they were firing bullets into a live person. The sexual predator thought they were abusing a child. Both were incorrect about their target (dead body, grown adult). It seems to me to be a direct parallel.
- philwelch 7y agoThough the better analogy might be: Bob knows that somebody is out to kill him and so he hides at the police station while a cop places a mannequin in his bed and waits in Bob’s closet for the murderer to show up. Or, more commonly, the cop goes undercover and poses as a hit man and gets the murderer on tape contracting the hit. That’s a pretty common sting and people get first degree murder convictions out of it.
- philwelch 7y agoThat’s true for most crimes. If you sneak into Bob’s bedroom and notice that he is already dead, but shoot his dead body anyway, you’ve technically only committed corpse desecration. (Setting aside the question of why you were sneaking into his bedroom with a loaded gun in the first place.) Intentionality is a central aspect of most crimes—that’s what distinguishes premeditated murder from manslaughter or felony murder.
- Causality1 7y agoSo if you paid someone to kill your coworker by casting a magic spell on them you're guilty of conspiracy to commit murder? How about praying for someone to be killed? Quite a few people believe that has a non-zero chance of working. On an unrelated note, I'm surprised internet pedophiles don't ever say something like "I know you're not really a child but I'm going to pretend you are because that's hot" to create plausible deniability in the event they're not actually talking to a child.
- sjy 7y agoPlenty of people have been prosecuted for conspiracies that, unbeknown to the conspirators, could not possibly have succeeded. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.1468-2230.1979.tb01518.x https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.1468-2230....
- philwelch 7y ago> So if you paid someone to kill your coworker by casting a magic spell on them you're guilty of conspiracy to commit murder? By matter of pure legality, I suppose it would. In practicality, I doubt you could prove beyond reasonable doubt that such a person genuinely believed that witchcraft was an effective means of committing homicide. This point is rather academic because any reasonable person believes that propositioning people on the internet who claim to be underage girls is, in fact, an effective method of propositioning underage girls.