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Attempted murder is a crime in England and Wales and Northern Ireland.
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In English criminal law, attempted murder is the crime of more than merely preparing to commit unlawful killing and at the same time having a specific intention to cause the death of human being under the Queen's Peace. The phrase "more than merely preparatory" is specified by the Criminal Attempts Act 1981 to denote the fact that preparation for a crime by itself does not constitute an "attempted crime".
In England and Wales, as an "attempt", attempted murder is an offence under section 1(1) of the Criminal Attempts Act 1981 and is an indictable offence which carries a maximum penalty of life imprisonment (the same as the mandatory sentence for murder). The corresponding legislation for Northern Ireland is section 3(1) of the Criminal Attempts and Conspiracy (Northern Ireland) Order 1983 (No.1120 (N.I.13)).
The mens rea (Latin for the "guilty mind") for murder includes an intention to kill or cause grievous bodily harm where there is a high probability of death resulting, whereas attempted murder depends on an intention to kill, and an overt act towards the homicide. Attempted murder is only the planning of a murder and acts taken towards it, not the actual killing, which is the murder. This makes the offence difficult to prove and it is more common for a lesser charge to be preferred under the Offences against the Person Act 1861.
However, in R v Morrison [2003] 1 WLR1859, the Court of Appeal considered the issue of alternative verdicts on an indictment with a single count of attempted murder. Morrison had gone into a shop with two other men on a robbery with a firearm. They demanded money and one of the men shot at the shopkeeper who suffered only minor injury. The prosecution had many opportunities to add other counts before the trial but failed to act. Having heard the case, the judge expressed his view that the jury could consider an attempted grievous bodily harm (GBH) under section 18 of the 1861 Act and Morrison was duly convicted of attempting to cause grievous bodily harm. The Court of Appeal confirmed that attempting to cause grievous bodily harm is a valid alternative to attempted murder because there can be no intention to kill someone without the intention also to cause grievous bodily harm.
This is a practical decision to ensure that the criminal justice system did not allow a guilty person to walk away because only one charge had been preferred. But it is not necessarily a good general principle because, in euthanasia for example, a person assisting intends to cause death, but with no suffering. That attempting to cause grievous bodily harm must be an alternative verdict should the intended "victim" not die would be a strange outcome because there is no intention to cause any long-lasting and serious injury: the two attempted offences have different mens rea requirements so that proof of intent to murder would not necessarily meet the requirement for section 18 of the 1861 Act.
First, acting deliberately and intentionally or recklessly with extreme disregard for human life, the person attempted to kill someone; and the person did something that was a substantial step toward committing the crime. [Mere preparation is not a substantial step toward committing a crime.]
There must be more than merely preparatory acts and, although the defendant may threaten death, this may not provide convincing evidence of an intention to kill unless the words are accompanied by relevant action, e.g. finding and picking up a weapon, and making serious use of it, or making a serious and sustained physical attack without a weapon.
The defences of duress and necessity are not available to a person charged with attempted murder. Conversely, the statutory defence of marital coercion is, on the face of the statute, available to a wife charged with attempted murder.[1][2] Academic writers have suggested that this is not consistent.
Prior to 1967, sections 11 to 15 of the Offences against the Person Act 1861 created a number of offences of attempting to commit murder by various specified means (ss.11 to 14), and an offence of attempting to commit murder by any means not specified in those offences (s.15).
After the repeal of these offences by the Criminal Law Act 1967, attempted murder was allowed to subsist at common law until the enactment of the 1981 Act.
In the United States, attempted murder is when one physically tries to kill someone. For example, shooting at a person would be attempted murder, while simply pointing a gun at someone would not be attempted murder.