Inchoate Offense - Intent

Intent

Every inchoate crime or offence must have the mens rea of intent or of recklessness, but most typically intent. Absent a specific law, an inchoate offense requires that the defendant have the specific intent to commit the underlying crime. For example, for a defendant to be guilty of the inchoate crime of solicitation of murder, he or she must have intended for a person to die.

Attempt, conspiracy, and solicitation all require mens rea.

On the other hand, RICO merely requires "knowing", that is, recklessness. Facilitation also requires "believing", yet another way of saying reckless.

Intent may be distinguished from recklessness and criminal negligence as a higher mens rea.

Read more about this topic:  Inchoate Offense

Famous quotes containing the word intent:

    The intent escalator lifts a serenade
    Stilly
    Of shoes, umbrellas, each eye attending its shoe, then
    Bolting outright somewhere above where streets
    Burst suddenly in rain. . . .
    Hart Crane (1899–1932)

    All great religions, in order to escape absurdity, have to admit a dilution of agnosticism. It is only the savage, whether of the African bush or the American gospel tent, who pretends to know the will and intent of God exactly and completely.
    —H.L. (Henry Lewis)

    One reason why we find so few men of reasonable and agreeable conversation is that there is scarcely anyone whose mind is not more intent upon what he himself has a mind to say than on making pertinent replies to what is being said to him.
    François, Duc De La Rochefoucauld (1613–1680)