September 20, 2006
Crim law hypotheticals
Here's a hypothetical Professor Dutile offered in crim law this morning.
Say you want to have someone killed. You go to a friend and say, "Here's a gun. Go kill that guy." Your friend, being the loyal type, agrees to.
Unbeknownst to you, your friend/flunky has a legally cognizable claim to self-defense and kills the target in self-defense.
Are you liable for murder?
Two theories:
A purely derivative theory would answer in the negative. As no murder has been committed, it's hard to hold you liable for it. No harm, no foul, as it were.
The majority position is that instead of a principal and an accomplice, you being an accomplice, there is but one actor: a principal acting through an innocent agent. In this case, you're going up river.
I love this stuff.
"a principal acting through an innocent agent"
-- but the agent isn't innocent. Some guy just uses their loyalty as an excuse to go kill somebody?
Come on Ryan. We know better! There has to be something more going on. Total depravity still exists (even if the defense lawyer and the judge don't adhere to it).
Posted by: Carrie at September 20, 2006 09:43 AMOk, wait. For a minute I forgot about the whole "innocent until proven guilty" aspect of law.
If "the agent" ultimately killed in self defense, then he's "innocent". What I don't understand is why he shouldn't be held accountable for going there in the first place. If he hadn't gone there, then the man would still be alive.
I know this is all hypothetical, but I don't understand why the "self-defender" shouldn't be held for being there in the first place.
You're misunderstanding the term "innocent". In legal terms, "innocent" simply means "not legally culpable". Children used by adults to commit crimes falls under this category: if the children aren't legally capable of forming the requisite intent to be found guilty of the crime, they're technically innocent, even if they did it. That doesn't change the fact that the adult who put them up to it is going to jail, thus we have a situation of "acting through an innocent agent".
You're also reading facts into the hypothetical. "Being there in the first place" wasn't part of the situation, and I don't know where you're getting that. All the hypo stipulates is that the killer had a legally complete defense for the killing, namely self-defense. In those cases, the culpability of the person who commissioned the killing is significantly more thorny than clear cases of cold-blooded hired killing.
Posted by: ryan at September 20, 2006 10:05 AMAs far as the innocent thing goes, I understand it cognitively now.
As far as "being there in the first place" I see where I read too much into it and began assuming.