Community Standards for Defining Attempt

Abstract

When should taking various steps toward the commission of a crime itself count as a crime? Different legal codes give remarkably different answers: The older common law criminalized individuals' attempts only if the steps had led the individual into dangerous proximity to successfully committing the crime, whereas the current Model Penal Code holds that an individual who has taken any substantial step toward committing a crime is liable. We presented college students and community respondents with a series of scenarios describing different levels of attempt and discovered that their views about liabilities for attempted crimes are better described by the older common law than the Model Penal Code. Further, we asked respondents to tell us how they thought that the various levels of attempt would be treated by the laws of the state in which they resided. They believed that the state law assigned liabilities that matched their own intuitions about appropriate liability judgments. Because they lived in a Model Penal Code state, this indicates that their beliefs about the law were inaccurate in an unfortunate direction: actual attempt liability was incurred far earlier than subjects thought it was. The discussion focuses on the implications of individuals' views about appropriate liability judgments for legal codes.