2025/01/03 by Elise Sugarman · 1 voice
Social Sciences · #Intellectual Property Law
paper · doi:10.16995/fe.17735
openalex publication_date 2025/01/03 · openalex created_date 2025/01/03 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/22
The correspondence requirement is a fundamental doctrinal principle in Anglo-American criminal law. It maintains that, in general, a particular relation between mens rea and actus reus is necessary for liability. Yet the nature of this relation is contested. Contemporaneity Theorists maintain that correspondence requires temporal overlap between mens rea and actus reus, while Causal Theorists maintain that correspondence is a non-deviant causal connection. In this paper, I argue that neither Contemporaneity Theory nor Causal Theory is able to account for the intuition that a special class of defendants—defendants in so-called supposed corpse cases—are liable for murder. Supposed corpse defendandts attempt to kill at t1, erroneously suppose they have done so, and then act again to cause death at t2. I go on to provide a novel positive proposal of correspondence in such cases. I argue that supposed corpse defendants are liable for murder because their killing is explained by ignorance that is in turn explained by an apparently successful execution of their intention to kill. The result serves as demonstration that the relation between intention and action grounding culpability is not the same as the relation grounding an action's status as intentional.