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justify conviction. Such a claim was substantiated in Attorney-General’s Reference No 3 of 1992 [16] where it was found that recklessness as to whether life would be endangered in the process of intended property damage was valid as it fit the completed offence. Thus it was prescribed that to ascertain the mental requirement for an attempted offence, it was necessary to look at the mental element of the full offence.

Current Problems with the Criminal Attempts Act 1981

Decisions based on objectivist views and common law interpretation reveals that most attempts, especially those of a violent nature, must involve a level of confrontation. Otherwise the burden of proof proves to be too heavy a load for the prosecution to bear. The injustice of this confrontation theory is seen in cases such as Geddes [17] in which a man was found with all his gathered necessary supplies hiding in a toilet lying in wait for a child whom he could falsely imprison. The court ruled that because this was no more than simple preparation it did not qualify as “more than merely preparatory” and was seen as not yet implementing the plan. Such reasoning seems preposterous as it hardly seems plausible that the defendant must have touched a child to be convictable. The fact that he entered the building demonstrates not only a worrisome lack of security on the school’s part but a deliberate proximity which transcends the mere preparation he undertook in the privacy of his own home. It is this idea of confrontation which plagues the current law under the act and should be abolished. If “more than merely preparatory” allows criminals to lurk in bathrooms with children in the vicinity and go unpunished than another choice of terminology of the actus reus is needed.

Another issue latent in the current law is the fact that conditional attempts, those in which the defendant intends to commit the crime based on some circumstance that arises, are too reliant on the structure of the indictment. For instance, if a man breaks into a car to steal a purse but upon finding that there is no wallet in the purse leaves the premises then he could quite possibly not be convicted of attempted robbery/theft. It all depends on how the indictment is written. Thus if the prosecution structures it to say that the charge is “attempting to steal money from a purse” the criminal would have a better chance of acquittal than if the charge read “attempting to steal the contents of a purse” as there was no money present in the purse. Although the current act tried to remedy this idea of getting proximate to an impossible crime through the addition of section 1(2), there is still room for improvement.

The Law Commission itself has lamented the fact that the ‘more than merely preparatory’ test is too vague and uncertain causing the jury to be perplexed as to where to draw the decisive line of demarcation.

The Commission concerns itself with the idea of fair labeling and whether he who was about to attempt but reconsidered should be placed in the same category as he who successfully attempted but failed in true execution and fulfillment of the crime. As Sir John Smith argued, the law is keen to focus on the harm involved in the offence: “the idea that guilt depends on whether an act causes the harmful result, irrational though it may be, is deep-seated in our law.” [18] When it comes down to it the man who is a本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。