COMMUNITY STANDARDS FOR DEFINING ATTEMPT - INCONSISTENCIES WITH THE MODEL PENAL-CODE

When should taking various steps toward the commission of a crime itse lf count as a crime? Different legal codes give remarkably different a nswers: The older common law criminalized individuals' attempts only i f the steps had led the individual into dangerous proximity to success fully committing the crime whereas the current Model Penal Code holds that an individual who has taken any substantial step toward committin g a crime is liable. We presented college students and community respo ndents with a series of scenarios describing different levels of attem pt and discovered that their views about liabilities for attempted cri mes are better described by the older common law than the Model Penal Code. Further we asked respondents to tell us how they thought that th e various levels of attempt would be treated by the laws of the state in which they resided They believed that the state law assigned liabil ities that matched their own intuitions about appropriate liability ju dgments. Because they lived in a Model Penal Code state, this indicate s that their beliefs about the law were inaccurate in an unfortunate d irection: actual attempt liability was incurred far earlier than subje cts thought it was. The discussion focuses on the implications of indi viduals' views about appropriate liability judgments for legal codes.