Should an attempt to commit a crime, such as an attempted murder, be considered a crime? If no property was harmed, and there was no threat of violence, then I guess there was no crime. Right? So for instance if I put poison in your cup of tea, but you throw away the tea, there was no crime and thus the poisoner should not be punished?
Hmm I read the thread where this was brought up before and it’d be interesting to hear opinions on the subject I’m not too versed on it myself.
For example a few years ago a few people tried to rob me while I was walking home on the sidewalk some throwing wild swings at me while I felt others try and go for my pockets, I punched one of them in the face and then some guy drove by real close with his truck honking his horn loudly and they all ran off(they couldnt have been more than 18 years old).
I didn’t lose anything and I even retaliated is that the end of the story or should I be able to punish them further in court?
Violating the boundaries of your personal space is trespass the same as any other kind of trespass. That they didn’t get anything from you is beside the point. In the case of mugging, I would speculate that the settlement for assault (which is what they did) would dwarf the property damages for anything removed from your person.
It is my view that trespasses are not only actionable (i.e. you can take immediate action until the trespass has ceased) but may be liable to settlement.
Clayton -
That’s no different if you placed a bomb in my house or car to kill me, and it does not detonate. Just because your plan to kill me didn’t work doesn’t mean you didn’t instill force or a threat of, it’s just you failed at achieving your goal. How many attempts would I allow of you to kill me before I say “that’s enough”? The attempt of a crime is still a threat of force, such as “Give me your wallet or I’ll shoot you”, it’s no more different than you trying to take my wallet without me noticing, just on a smaller scale. If I caught you in that act, I’d tell you to go off on your way and never come back again. Attempted murder is more serious as it threatens the lively hood of my being.
Where I see the difference is whether someone puts their plan into action. The plan to kill someone, whether or not it worked, was put into action, but this is different than simply having the plan to kill someone, and never act upon it. I could easily come up with a way to kill someone by placing some poison in their food etc., but never actually have any intention to carry the plan out in reality, just a blueprint and nothing more.
I’ll make two arguments. The first is in support of decriminailizing attempts, and the second is in support for not decriminalizing them.
If you failed to detonate a bomb or failed to poison me, and I proved in court that you did try these things, it will serve already a deterrence against future actions against me, because if you do succeed in killing me next time, it will be obvious that it was you and not someone else, so the previous attempts will be considered as an overwhelming proof.
- If you look at the estoppel argument of Kinsella, if you tried to assasinate me, you cannot later complain about me trying to assasinate you. So according to this I think the court should give me a permission to assasinate you.
I’m inclined to agree with Gandhi that eye-for-an-eye is not compensatory justice.
If you kill someone in self-defense, they can’t claim against you. What you propose is different. You can’t use estoppel to violate the NAP.
Rothbard argues the following:
Professor Epstein, in attempting to preserve a separate realm for criminal law as against a proposed collapse into tort law, rests much of his case on the law of attempts. In criminal law, an attempted crime that for some reason fails and results in no damage or invasion of the rights of the victim, is still a crime and can be prosecuted. And yet, Epstein charges, such an attempted crime would not be an invasion of rights and therefore could not be a tort and could not be prosecuted under tort law.[88]
“The entire structure of criminal law must be dispensed with, and that we are left with tort law, where the victim indeed presses charges against the aggressor.”
Randy Barnett’s rebuttal, however, is conclusive. Barnett points out, first, that most unsuccessful attempts at invasion result nevertheless in “successful” though lesser invasion of person or property, and would therefore be prosecutable under tort law. “For example, attempted murder is usually an aggravated assault and battery, attempted armed robbery is usually an assault, attempted car theft or burglary is usually a trespass.”[89] Secondly, even if the attempted crime created no invasion of property per se, if the attempted battery or murder became known to the victim, the resulting creation of fear in the victim would be prosecutable as an assault. So the attempted criminal (or tortfeasor) could not get away unscathed.
Therefore, the only attempted invasion that could not be prosecuted under the law of torts would be one that no one ever knew anything about. But if no one knows about it, it cannot be prosecuted, under any law
I’m not sure I understand his point about creating fear, why is the creation of fear punishable by violence? Isn’t that unlibertarian? What about a failed poisoning? That surely wouldn’t count as assault.