Legal impossibility is a traditional

common law Common law (also known as judicial precedent, judge-made law, or case law) is the body of law primarily developed through judicial decisions rather than statutes. Although common law may incorporate certain statutes, it is largely based on prece ...

defense Defense or defence may refer to: Tactical, martial, and political acts or groups * Defense (military), forces primarily intended for warfare * Civil defense, the organizing of civilians to deal with emergencies or enemy attacks * Defense industr ...

to a charge of an attempted

crime In ordinary language, a crime is an unlawful act punishable by a State (polity), state or other authority. The term ''crime'' does not, in modern criminal law, have any simple and universally accepted definition,Farmer, Lindsay: "Crime, definiti ...

. Legal impossibility arises when the act, if completed, would not be a crime.''Criminal Law - Cases and Materials'', 7th ed. 2012,

Wolters Kluwer Law & Business Wolters Kluwer N.V. is a Dutch information services company. The company serves legal, business, tax, accounting, finance, audit, risk, compliance, and healthcare markets. Wolters Kluwer in its current form was founded in 1987 with a merger bet ...

;

John Kaplan (law professor) John Kaplan (1929November 25, 1989) was an American legal scholar, social scientist, social justice advocate, popular law professor, and author. He was a leading authority in the field of criminal law, and was widely known for his legal analyses ...

Robert Weisberg Robert I. Weisberg is an American lawyer. He is the Edwin E. Huddleson Jr. Professor of Law at Stanford Law School. Weisberg is an authority on criminal law and criminal procedure, as well as a scholar in the law and literature movement. Educa ...

Guyora Binder Guyora Binder (born 7 November 1956) is a legal scholar and writer. Binder has been faculty at University at Buffalo Law School and Boston University School of Law, and has been published in the Boston University Law Review. In 2012, he wrote ' ...

,

/ref> A person believes they are committing a

, but the act is, in fact, lawful. For example, a person may believe they are receiving stolen goods, but the goods are in fact not stolen. A different form of legal impossibility (known as "hybrid legal impossibility") comes into play when an actor's goal is illegal, but commission of the crime is impossible due to a factual mistake regarding the legal status of one of the attendant circumstances of one of the elements of the crime. For example, a man attempting to bribe someone whom he mistakenly believes is a juror is not liable for attempted bribery of a juror. On the other hand, some jurisdictions may find the actor guilty of attempt. The United States Model Penal Code did away with the legal impossibility defense. Under the MPC, a defendant is guilty of an attempt to commit a crime if they purposely engage in conduct which would constitute the object crime if the attendant circumstances were as they believed them to be.Model Penal Code §5.01(1)(a)

Footnotes

{{DEFAULTSORT:Legal Impossibility Common law Crime