Generally in the criminal law, a person's state of mind is among the most important factors in determining whether his conduct constituted a criminal act. For example, any unlawful killing of a person is a "homicide." But as those familiar with Law & Order will tell you, homicide is an umbrella term covering a variety of flavors of wrongful death. For instance, a person whose reckless acts result in the death of another will be found guilty of Involuntary Manslaughter. Even if he intentionally kills the other person but does so "in the sudden heat of passion" after being provoked, his offense probably only rises to the level of Voluntary Manslaughter. Our hypothetical homicide-happy human cannot be branded a murder unless his killing is accompanied by "malice;" even then, his mental state--specifically whether after deliberation and premeditation he had formed a specific intent to kill--will determine whether he is guilty of First or Second Degree Murder.
On the other hand, my fellow juris doctors have not adhered entirely faithfully to this maxim that mentality governs criminality. When accused of a crime, one may attempt to defend himself by claiming that it was "impossible" for him to be guilty of the offense. Impossibility, like most legal doctrines, has been fragmented and re-defined in order to allow lawyers a greater control over life as we know it. In this case, impossibility has been divided into "legal impossibility" and "factual impossibility."
Legal Impossibility is an aberrant phenomenon in criminal law. Under this doctrine, a person's state of mind is irrelevant to criminality. Effectively, the legal impossibility defense stands on the fact that you can't be convicted of attempting something that isn't a crime. Suppose I came to be under the impression that California enacted a statute making it a capital offense to eat ice cream cones without wearing a shirt on Tuesday afternoons. Being the anti-social mayhem-loving anarchist that I am, I decide to "stick it to the man" and spend all of my Tuesday afternoons walking around shirtless double-fisting ice cream cones and gloating at the top of my lungs how I am California's most notorious and nefarious criminal. Despite my criminally-inclined mindset, I cannot be convicted of my ice cream crime, which of course does not exist.
Factual Impossibility, on the other hand, is no defense at all. This version of impossibility arises from plain, simple reality. In short, if circumstances unknown to a would-be criminal prevent his crime, he still may be convicted. A classic example involves dim-witted death dealers. Suppose now I came to be under the impression that my landlord was the person responsible for outlawing my favorite manner of ice cream consumption. Naturally I could not abide the existence of such an individual, so I set in motion a plan to break into her home and murder her in her sleep. Death, who also favors Tuesday afternoon shirtless ice cream consumption, decides to help me out and visits my landlord that evening, and she passes peacefully in her sleep. Unfortunately, I didn't get the memo, and I break into her home and shoot her corpse. Although I have just attempted to kill a person who was already dead and thus could not possibly have done so, I am still liable to be convicted of attempted murder!
The long and the short of it is, lawyers have no use for facts and reality. Those minor-league, kiddy table details can be left to God. The greater lawyering community would rather construct our own fantastical world in which we are free to follow or ignore our own rules as we see fit.
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