I feel like this is really stretching the concept of ‘no stupid questions’, but anyway, here we are:

Let’s say someone is given a button, and are told that if they press the button, a specific person will die. They firmly believe this to be the case. They consciously choose to press the button, fully intending that the outcome is that the specified person dies - they desire that outcome, and make a conscious decision in an attempt to carry it out.

However, the button does nothing. It wasn’t hooked up to anything, it was just a random button. There was never any chance of anyone dying from this interaction.

Is the person who pressed the button guilty of attempted murder?

A very basic layman’s terms description of attempted murder (from the top result in a search) is:

Attempted murder is the failed or aborted attempt to murder another person. Just like other crimes, attempted murder consists of both an action and an intention. In attempted murder, a person must take a direct step towards the killing and must have the specific intent to kill that person.

It sounds like those criteria have been met in this case. Have they been? If not, why not?

Would the answer be different if the subject was told that (for example) the button controlled an explosive device in the intended victim’s car, or some other very specific effect that pressing it would have, versus simply that it would cause them to die in a nebulous, unspecified way?

An alternate version of the scenario: What if the person buys a ‘Death Note’ notebook, fully believes that it is real and will work, and writes someone’s name in it with the intent to kill them?