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That'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.
by megous 7y ago
That'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.