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Let's say I've spent years setting up the perfect murder to kill person A. Then, when the time comes, I learn some information that makes me realize I'd rather person B died than person A. Thus, at the last minute, I swap out the murder victim, but use the otherwise detailed murder plan to kill B.

I am clearly a murderer, but was the murder premeditated, because I used a premeditated method, or was it not premeditated since I wasn't planning to kill B until the last minute?

I know transferred intent applies if I was trying to kill A and killed B instead, which would make the murder premeditated. But in this scenario I explicitly changed plans to only target B. I'm not sure if the premeditation for killing A transfers when I never actually followed through with an attempt to kill A.

So, what kind of murderer am I?

Rodrigo de Azevedo
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dsollen
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3 Answers3

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It's still premeditated murder because you made a decision to kill and then acted on it.

"Premeditation" doesn't require detailed planning or an extended period of time between the decision and the action; it just requires some amount of time in which you could have changed your mind after thinking that you want to kill a person -- in some cases, even as little as a few seconds between the act that provoked the murder and the murder itself.

There are many ways of defining the term, but the Supreme Court has accepted instructions that tell jurors to find premeditation if there was a "second thought" about whether to proceed with "a preconceived design to kill." Fisher v. United States, 328 U.S. 463 (1946).

So even if you are literally talking about a minute of time between the decision to kill B and the execution of that plan, the murder is sufficiently premeditated to support a conviction for first-degree murder.

bdb484
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The fact that you planned to murder someone at all is enough to convict on 1st degree Murder. The level of planning is not bound by time or revising your plans or recycling them. You shouldn't have killed someone in the first place and you shouldn't have planned to kill them and taken all the steps either.

Suppose that you set up your death trap to kill Alice, and then Bob, who you never intended to harm - or even knew for that matter -, springs the trap before Alice and is killed. The law says if you planned to kill someone and someone dies, your guilty. It doesn't have an exception because "you didn't plan to kill that guy." It doesn't say you have to kill the specific person you planned to kill... you just have to plan to kill someone and kill someone.

As discussed in the notes, Second degree murder requires no planning but because of how pre-meditation has been defined to a very narrow moment of time, the scenarios for murder with no premeditation are basically "A man comes home to find his wife sleeping with another man, flies into a rage, and kills the other man before calming down." It has to occur that quick. The fact that you switched targets doesn't mean you didn't plan the second target's murder. It just means you made a few drafts to kill someone. In many ways it's worse, because you have no reason to kill any target, you just wanted to kill someone.

justhalf
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hszmv
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Long Story Short

Premeditated murder means you know that you will get someone killed by acting in a certain way.

From the Merriam-Webster dictionary:

Premeditation: consideration or planning of an act beforehand that shows intent to commit that act.

In this case, the court focuses if you had the intent to commit murder. The target itself is less relevant.

It would be a different story if you wanted to kill A and end only with B dead.

nsolled
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