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Apr. 3rd, 2009 @ 12:34 pm 
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I'm not sure what to think of this.
In 1743, Jonathan Bradford, an Oxford innkeeper, was executed for murder on circumstantial evidence: he was found in the room of one of his guests, who had been murdered in his bed. Bradford was holding a knife. He was innocent of the murder.
As it turns out, he had gone in, intending to murder the guest for his money, but discovered that someone had beaten him to it. As it turns out, it was the dead man's servant, who made a deathbed confession.
The thing is, he was hanged for a crime he did not commit... but he had intended to commit that exact crime, just someone else did it first.
Setting aside approval/disapproval of the death penalty itself, was his prosecution wholly unjustified?
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mens_reaNormally the problem is guilty act without guilty mind, and not vice versa! Since there's no "actus reus" for anything beyond carrying a knife, possibly with intent, I'd say his prosecution (and certainly his sentence) were almost entirely unjustified. And unfair. And would be perceived as a massive miscarriage of justice today. I think this is all basically Jurisprudence 101 / Ethics 101. Kant and good intentions, and so on.
Right, except that that is all about whether the criminal act was intentional or not. Accidental "crime" and so on.
Whereas this guy had every intention of murdering and robbing a guest in his inn, and was merely pre-empted from doing so; had whoever caught him arrived at the same time with the victim not already murdered by someone else, they could well have either caught him in the act, or narrowly prevented the murder.
Perhaps he would have been better charged with "attempted murder" - he made the attempt and was prevented by circumstances beyond his control, after all.
In our times they don't charge people with attempted murder without the final act that was anticipated to kill having been carried out, as far as I know.
"Whereas this guy had every intention of murdering and robbing a guest in his inn, and was merely pre-empted from doing so"
I think it's a long and precipitous leap from saying that someone has had the appearance of planning to do something, to saying that they actually intended to, or would have in the absence of some other event. There's an awful lot of "screwing your courage to the sticking place" involved in committing murder I imagine: who's to say if Bradford would've had the stones for it?
Leaving aside capital punishment, I would be horrified if this man was convicted of murder and sentenced accordingly today. Let's not forget, he didn't actually commit a crime. "By your works you shall be judged".
A simple thought experiment would be to extend this line of reasoning to lesser crimes than murder, or shakier evidence of intentions (shakier still!) than standing around with a knife. A quick descent into absurdity.
People often incline to badness but the deliberations of free will, in as much as they don't actually involve bad acts, shouldn't be punishable. If you want to make loitering with a knife a crime, by all means do: I hope the punishment will be less severe than that for murder.
I have to quote Sideshow Bob here and say
"Attempted murder? What kind of a crime is that? Do they give a Nobel Prise for atempted physics?"
Or something like that.
Unless he has actually stabbed the man, he's not guilty, intent is enough to punish him FOR the crime. It is why we have attempted murder different from murder, and all the other "conspiracy to" type crimes.
Maybe as he went to plunge in the knife, he'd have looked on the man and had a sudden crisis of conscious.
Perhaps hegot his just desserts but not justice.
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| Date: |
April 3rd, 2009 02:30 pm (UTC) |
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Maybe as he went to plunge in the knife, he'd have looked on the man and had a sudden crisis of conscious.
This is my thought. He may have had the intent to commit murder, but he lacked the opportunity, and so we have no idea if he would have changed his mind at the last moment.
The following is speculation based on nothing:
Now, the circumstances being what they are, do we know if there was suspicion he'd actually killed people for their money before this? If there'd been a rash of mysterious unsolved deaths around him, that might have disposed the prosecution to think he only happened to be caught this time for the same thing he'd done and gotten away with before. That doesn't make this conviction any more correct; individual crimes should be prosecuted on their own merits. However again, considering the circumstances, a man who would kill one guest for his money probably would kill others. Just a speculation as to why the case might have been decided the way it was.
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