Transferred malice, or transferred intent, is the criminal doctrine that states that if D tries to kill A, and accidentally kills B, the intent to kill transfers from A to B, and so D is guilty of murdering B. This is widely viewed as a useful legal fiction. One of the finest essays on this topic was written by our honorand, Douglas N. Husak. Husak views both the potential usefulness of, and his preferred alternative to, transferred malice through the lens (...) of sentencing – how much hard treatment the offender will receive. In this essay, I take a step back and ask in what ways transferred malice might be useful. I find its potential usefulness is not restricted to sentencing, but thinking about other ways in which it might be useful actually brings other potential drawbacks into focus – in particular, I argue, transferred malice mislabels the crimes the offender committed, and does so in a way that erases one of the victims from the moral description of the crime. (shrink)

I tackle the difficult problem of specifying how voluntary intoxication affects criminal culpability generally and recklessness in particular. I contend that the problem need not be conceptualized as an instance of actio libera in causa, namely the situation in which persons do something at t1 to culpably create the conditions of their own defense at t2. Instead, I argue that we need only consider intoxicated defendants at t2 in order to justify their punishment. In the course of defending my view, (...) I challenge conventional wisdom about both the nature of recklessness and the effects of intoxicants. I conclude by discussing a possible ground on which involuntary intoxication might be treated differently. (shrink)

Common law treats cases of misfire in which the actor has a valid defence in relation to either the intended victim or the victim actually harmed as particular instances of ‘transferred malice’. It is said that just as the actor’s intention is fictitiously ‘transferred’ from the intended victim to the victim harmed so are defences, meaning that any—and only—defences that would have been available to the actor had he harmed the intended victim will be granted to him with regard to (...) the harm caused to the actual victim. I argue that the blanket solution of transferring defences ‘as is’, without accounting for their differing rationales and their specific implications for cases of misfire, produces bad reasoning and oversimplified decisions—and should therefore be substituted by a separate examination of the actor’s liability with respect to each victim and each type of defence. However, I reject the more robust argument that commentators have made, that a conclusion against transferring defences entails a conclusion against transferred malice in general. I argue that the underlying logic of transferred malice—i.e., treating victims of equivalent wrongs alike—stays intact even if we excise from it the treatment of cross-victim defences. (shrink)