Re:Criminal Complaint against Ross Ulbricht aka "Dread Pirat...
by dragonwriter on Thursday October 03, 2013 @11:04AM
(#6489373)
> But against whom was a crime committed.
As with any crime, it was committed against the State.
> If you pretend to have a sister and I order a hit on that figment of your imagination then have I committed a crime?
Yes.
> So whilst there was conspiracy it was not against a person
In the US (and, for that matter, most of the rest of the world) crimes don't have to be "against a person". England went through a few years in the late 1970s where a conspiracy to commit an impossible act was not a crime, but specifically amended the 1977 law which a 1978 court case found implied that effect to remove it in 1981; to my knowledge the impossibility of the prohibited agreed-to act has never been a bar to conspiracy convictions in the US.
> It seems that if the conspiracy were against a person who never existed and were adjudged to be a crime that writers would be similarly guilty when they plan a storyline in which someone is purposefully killed.
A writer planning a story line involves neither two or more people agreeing to commit an unlawful act nor one of taking a concrete action to put that agreement into effect, and so contains neither of the elements of the general crime of conspiracy, independently of the impossibility issue. So, no, they wouldn't be guilty of conspiracy, independently of the issue at hand.
As with any crime, it was committed against the State.
> If you pretend to have a sister and I order a hit on that figment of your imagination then have I committed a crime?
Yes.
> So whilst there was conspiracy it was not against a person
In the US (and, for that matter, most of the rest of the world) crimes don't have to be "against a person". England went through a few years in the late 1970s where a conspiracy to commit an impossible act was not a crime, but specifically amended the 1977 law which a 1978 court case found implied that effect to remove it in 1981; to my knowledge the impossibility of the prohibited agreed-to act has never been a bar to conspiracy convictions in the US.
> It seems that if the conspiracy were against a person who never existed and were adjudged to be a crime that writers would be similarly guilty when they plan a storyline in which someone is purposefully killed.
A writer planning a story line involves neither two or more people agreeing to commit an unlawful act nor one of taking a concrete action to put that agreement into effect, and so contains neither of the elements of the general crime of conspiracy, independently of the impossibility issue. So, no, they wouldn't be guilty of conspiracy, independently of the issue at hand.