Conditional Intent
In Holloway v. United States, the United States Supreme Court case upheld the use of "conditional intent" as a necessary element of the crime of carjacking. Conditional intent means that a defendant may not negate a proscribed intent merely by requiring the victim to comply with a condition. For example, a person saying, "Get out of the car or I'll shoot you" satisfies the "intent to kill" – so long as the prosecution can prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant would have at least attempted to harm or kill if the victim had not complied (in other words, the prosecution must show that the threat was real, and not a bluff).
Read more about this topic: Intently
Famous quotes containing the words conditional and/or intent:
“Computer mediation seems to bathe action in a more conditional light: perhaps it happened; perhaps it didn’t. Without the layered richness of direct sensory engagement, the symbolic medium seems thin, flat, and fragile.”
—Shoshana Zuboff (b. 1951)
“Young, and so thin, and so straight.
So straight! as if nothing could ever bend her.
But poor men would bend her, and doing things with poor men,
Being much in bed, and babies would bend her over,
And the rest of things in life that were for poor women,
Coming to them grinning and pretty with intent to bend and to kill.”
—Gwendolyn Brooks (b. 1917)