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?
IANAL. In the USA, the majority of US States adopt some definition of murder based on the age-old definition from English common law. But each state modifies the definition to include or exclude things, to the point that discussing even just a single state’s definition would be a mini law course. However, some generalities can be drawn using just the age-old definition.
Murder is generally defined as having four elements, or components which the trier-of-fact (eg a jury) must find in order for culpability to attach. Attempted murder is the absence of the fourth element. This is not rigorous, since again, we’d have to identify the exact jurisdiction and the question didn’t indicate one. Anyone who has:
Is guilty of the crime of murder. As a minor discussion of these points, the first element means that positively doing something (eg cutting a safety strap) and not doing something (eg not turning off the electricity to exposed wires) can be parts of a murder charge. For the second element, the term “proximate cause” is a legal term deeply entwined with “foreseeability” and whether a chain of causation or liability connects the act with the death. A Rube Goldberg-esque manner of death might fail the proximate cause element, unless the setup was purposely concocted precisely to kill. Likewise, proximate cause isn’t always the last element in a chain of events, since that would mean a victim would be their own killer for walking into a sniper’s bullet.
The third element, malice aforethought, refers to the mental state of the accused. That is, did they genuinely intend great harm and/or death upon the victim. Different jurisdictions vary on whether an intent-to-merely-assault that leads to death can be charged with murder, and often times that’s what second-degree murder is used for. Mental state is not a binary quantity either, as different “levels” of mental state correspond to different charges, all else the same. Malice aforethought is the worst sort, corresponding to a killer that plans a victim’s death, or acts with utter disregard for any victim’s life. Lesser levels might be charged as “reckless homicide”, “negligent homicide”, etc.
Finally, the fourth element for murder is that the victim must actually die. If the victim is immediately dead and this is verifiable using the body, this is easy to prove in court. But if the victim lingers, the legal jurisdiction might adopt a “year and a day” rule, since if the victim doesn’t die quickly, then it’s assault/battery rather than murder. Or if the victim is believed to be dead but it can’t be proven – eg victim’s body never recovered – then the defense might try to argue that the victim is simply missing but alive.
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OK, so to the question. You’ve described a scenario where someone has: 1) affirmatively pressed the kill button, 2) which is believed to result in person X’s death, 3) with full intention to kill person X, but 4) person X does not die. At even a passing glance, this is not murder since person X is alive. But does it meet the first three elements to support attempted murder? Probably not, at least without additional details.
Element #1 and #3 are present, but it’s element #2 that will be problematic. It isn’t sufficient to just tell someone that “yes, this button will absolutely kill person X”. At the very minimum, the accused needs to at least be aware of the mechanism that person X will be killed, and how that relates to the “kill button”. An implied method-of-death would suffice, such as when ordering a skilled archer to assassinate a rival. Even though the accused just says “go kill him”, the accused is aware that the archer is capable of killing using their bow-and-arrow. Whereas ordering a toddler to kill the rival would be presumed as nonsensical.
If, however, the button was already demo’d to the accused as killing some other (pretend) victim first – meaning the accused has seen the manner that the “button press” leads to death – that might establish proximate cause, even if it’s not obvious what the cause of death was. If the pretend victim clutches their chest and falls down, it’s plausible to the accused that the button’s mechanism somehow involves a pacemaker malfunction. If instead the accused is told specifically that the bombs on the victim’s car will go off, then that’s a more solid establishment of element #2, although even bombs do not reliably detonate.
But there’s even more: just because a set of circumstances arguably meets the three elements for attempted murder, it’s ultimately the trier-of-fact that will have to believe it. That is to say, it would be tough to convince a jury that the accused had “absolute” certainty that the button would kill, which also affects element #1. Unless the accused admits to that after-the-fact, that’s tough to prove. What is illegal according to the elements of a crime is not the same as what will easily convince a jury.
If it seems like this elements – or really all the elements – of murder are fact-intensive, that’s because they are. Killing is as old as humans are, and how it’s been performed and how it’s been regulated/abolished has evolved over history. Modern legal scholars have to figure out how things like stochastic terrorism/killings or life-affecting afflictions (eg HIV/AIDS) should be fitted into the system of written law, because modern law requires writing down the crimes beforehand.