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The "hard cases" for the law relating to accomplices deal with the definition of what counts as aiding and abetting a crime. A retailer might sell a murder weapon in the ordinary course of business, while an accomplice might do nothing because their help was simply not needed. How do we distinguish between these cases? The Capitol Riot is a striking example of this sort of hard case because there were so many people involved in so many different and ambiguous ways. Outside of the conceptually easy cases of someone caught on camera making off with property or attacking officers, who should be found guilty of what? A lack of a rubric for answering these questions makes collective crimes like the Capitol Riot especially challenging for the law. Drawing on philosophy of action and game-theoretic reasoning, we develop a novel model of complicity built on the concept of standing in reserve and show how it helps to understand joint intention and responsibility in complex social situations, such as those where only a proper subset of participants may actively engage in the primary criminal act. This model of complicity is consistent with the fundamental normative commitments of criminal law, such as the central importance of mens rea and punishing only intentional actions. Standing in reserve thus offers a principled, coherent approach to identifying complicity in these hard cases. Through a series of applications, we show how the standing in reserve model sheds light on the Capitol Riot as well as related controversies including guilt by association, terrorism, and felony murder. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on the analysis of intent element of generic burglary in the case United States v. McArthur by U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit. It discusses that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit stated requirement of intent to form at the moment of unlawful entry or remaining in for the purposes of enhanced sentencing under the Armed Career Criminal Act.

Although in German and in Spanish legal systems there are no express provisions with regard to the criminal negligence (culpa), this has not hindered the legal doctrine and jurisprudence to thoroughly analyse this form of guilt. This made it possible to qualify as intentional offences some deeds which in our legal system are considered to be committed with conscious negligence (involving foresight). The difficulty to distinguish between indirect intention (dolus eventualis) and conscious negligence (luxuria) has nonetheless determined Spanish courts to ask the legislator to provide a clear definition of indirect intention, which could be an additional argument with respect to the weaknesses entailed by such a legal approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Federal substantive criminal law and constitutional remedies might seem to be distinct bodies of law. But since the closing decades of the twentieth century, the Supreme Court has demonstrated an increasing unwillingness in both areas to impose either direct or indirect sanctions on persons who violate the law but whose conduct is not necessarily indicative of an unlawful or antisocial intent. Instead, the Court has tended to narrow liability or remedy to instances in which there is evidence that the regulated actor contravened not just the law on the books but also a social understanding of legality. We call this supervening criterion for individual criminal or civil liability an apparent fault requirement. This Article documents the contemporaneous rise of an apparent fault requirement across two domains of Supreme Court jurisprudence and explores its causes as well as its effects. We argue that the demand for apparent fault is likely to make some kinds of coercive regulation less costly even as it imposes an inhibiting tax on other species of state intervention. Rather than diagnosing apparent fault's rise as an endogenous product of legal reasoning, we situate it within a broader historical and intellectual context as a way of showing the value of understanding doctrine in the context of its sociocultural moment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rise of the willful blindness doctrine in the Spanish legal system implies a structural change in the subjective imputation system, given that according to this doctrine, it is posible to punish as intentional act a conduct which may be described as ignoring elements of crime that could and should have been known by the perpetrator. This new approach entails the equalization of effective knowledge of the elements of a crime with the duty to know them, therefore understanding the ascertainment of intent in criminal law as an act of attribution, and leading to a complete normativization of the concept of intent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In art. 16 paragraph (2) and (4), the new Romanian Criminal code provides „(2) Guilt exists when an action is committed with direct intent, with basic intent or oblique intent.” and „(4) An action is committed with basic intent when the perpetrator: a) can foresee the outcome of their actions but does not accept it, believing without reason that such outcome will not occur; b) cannot foresee the outcome of their actions, though they should and could have done so.” In art. 16 paragraph (6), the Criminal code provides „(6) The act consisting of an action or inaction shall constitute an offense when committed with direct intent. The act committed with basic intent constituted an offense only when the law specifically establishes it as such.” How to find out, the new romanian Criminal code regulates exlicitly the basic intent with foresight and the basic intent whidout forsight. The Criminal code does not regulate other approaches of basic intent, which are analyzed in doctrine. However, these are reference points to be taken into consideration when the judiciaries analyze the criminal guilt whenever an offence has been committed under the criminal law. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How should the criminal law treat a person who did not pay any attention to the existence of attendant circumstances noted in the definition of an offense? This mental state of lack of attention to the existence of the attendant circumstance is analogous to the existence of a void in the actor's consciousness, and has therefore been awarded the name "cognitive void." Because the criminal law is founded on cognitive theory that offers a binary concept to establish an accused's state of mind depending on the existence or absence of cognition, it is difficult to impose criminal liability on an actor who acted out of a cognitive void. The purpose of this Article is to discuss the difficulty that it engenders and the attempts to solve this difficulty. The Article presents the proposed thesis, suggesting that different states of cognitive void should be examined in accordance with the extent of culpability that they represent. Therefore, the Article calls for the abandonment of the prevalent basic assumption that sees cognitive void as a state indicating lack of subjective mens rea, and suggests replacing it with a normative approach that would recognize cognitive void as a multidimensional term covering a range of different mental states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The criminal law doctrine of oblique intent was developed at common law to deal with situations in which the agent acted without purpose or desire but where the harmful result of his conduct was foreseen at a very high probability. In its most recent form the doctrine holds that ‘the jury should be directed that they are not entitled to find the necessary intention, unless they feel sure that [the harmful result] was a virtual certainty (barring some unforeseen intervention) as a result of the defendant’s actions and that the defendant appreciated that such was the case.’ Yet, the doctrine does not provide any guidance as to which moral consideration should be taken into account in deciding whether intention may be found. Through a comparison with the parallel doctrine of psik reishei developed in Jewish law as far back as 200 CE the article offers a way for the English doctrine to account for the various moral positions of the perpetrator or the moral character of his actions that such scenarios may raise. The article argues that some cases which are currently dealt with by the doctrine of oblique intent ought to be discussed in the context of actus reus, and any moral considerations ought to be ignored. In all other instances, and based on the understanding that oblique intent is not (direct) intent but rather a claim for moral equivalence, a classification based on the desirability-of-the-results has the potential to replace the general discretion currently left for the juries and help ensure a more consistent assessment and better ex-ante guidance of behaviour. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

I focus on the set of problems that arise in identifying both the actus reus and (to an even greater extent) the mens rea needed by an abettor before she should be criminally liable for complicity in a crime. No consensus on these issues has emerged in positive law; commentators are enormously dissatisfied with the decisions courts have reached; and critics disagree radically about what reforms should be implemented to rectify this state of affairs. I explicitly deny that I will be able to solve these problems, although I hope at least to identify a central source of the confusion. In my view, the problem results largely from conceptualizing the liability of abettors as derivative. This diagnosis helps us to understand why the problem is likely to remain insoluble in positive law. If the test of an adequate theory consists primarily in its ability to produce results that conform to our moral intuitions about how particular cases should be resolved, no approach that can be implemented in the real world will prove wholly satisfactory. I advance a hypothesis about why failure is inevitable and what should be done in light of this predicament. Legal realities compel us to adopt a position that is suboptimal from a moral point of view. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Courts and commentators are notoriously puzzled about the mens rea standards for complicity. Accomplices intend to aid, but what attitude need they have towards the crimes that they aid? This paper both criticizes extant accounts of the mens rea of complicity and offers a new account. The paper argues that an intention can commit one to an event's occurrence without committing one to promoting the event, or making it more likely to take place. Under the proposed account of the mens rea of complicity, an accomplice must have an intention that commits him to the crime's occurrence, but need not commit him to making it more likely that the crime occurs. The paper traces the implications of this view both for several difficult complicity cases, and for ongoing debates among philosophers of action about the necessary and sufficient conditions of joint agency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on various cases in the Supreme Court of Florida related to mistreatment of mens rea and drug possession. Topics discussed include mens rea in criminal law, brief history of Section 893.13 of the Florida Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act and role of the judicial deference in criminal activities. It also discusses the powers and ability of the courts for creating the criminal laws.

The doctrine of transferred intent (or transferred 'malice' in England) generally provides that if A attempts to harm B but, because of bad aim, misses and accidentally causes the same harm to befall C, A's harmful intent vis-à-vis B is transferred to C, thus rendering A guilty of intentionally harming C. Commentators acknowledge the doctrine to be a legal fiction, but they differ regarding whether the fiction produces just results, some believing it does, others believing that A is guilty at most of attempting to harm B rather than intentionally harming C. Commentators who agree that the fiction produces just results nevertheless differ regarding whether the fiction should be retained or whether A's intent to harm 'a' person, in this case, B, is the only intent that signifies for crimes of intentional harm, regardless of whom A eventually harms. Doug Husak sought to achieve reflective equilibrium between intuition and theory regarding bad-aim cases by proposing in 1996 that A be punished for attempting to harm B (rather than for harming C) but sentenced as if he had harmed B. I once believed that Husak was correct. But I now have doubts, in part because Husak, along with others, cannot explain why the strength of people's intuitions regarding A's responsibility in bad-aim cases depends upon (1) C's being a reasonably foreseeable victim, and (2) C's being harmed by the same threat of force that A initially unleashed against B. I argue that one cannot achieve reflective equilibrium in bad-aim cases without inquiring into why resulting harm matters in criminal law, and that when one does, one discovers that just as people's intuitions regarding whether intentional harms are proximate depend upon how resulting harms occur, so, too, people's intuitions regarding whether an actor is guilty of intentional harm depend upon how resulting harm comes about. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the requirement of the Quid-Pro-Quo intent, "a specific intent to give or receive something of value in exchange for an official act." in section 666 of the Comprehensive Crime Control Act of 1984 in the U.S. It discusses the circuits that require proof of Quid-Pro-Quo Intent and also presents the legislative history of the above mentioned section. Further, it is concluded that there is a need for quid-pro-quo intent in the section.

In this paper, I reply to the very thoughtful comments on my book by Antony Duff, Doug Husak, Al Mele and Alec Walen. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the author's comment on offences related to mens rea requirements of assisting and encouraging offences with reference to the case R v. Sadique and Hussain. The author's opines on the Part 2 of the Serious Crime Act 2007 for assisting and encouraging offences. The author discusses the section 45 and section 46 offences, which focus on those offences that require a person to assist or encourage another person believing that the person will commit a principal offence.

The author expresses some ideas that characterize the complex offence with an exceeded intention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the New Zealand court case J v. R, which dealt with the prosecution of attempted sexual violation due to proximate cause. Topics include the evidence of intent against the defendant, the mens rea required for a proximate cause conviction, and if a conviction on the grounds of proximate cause can be considered a miscarriage of justice.