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🎧 EPISODE SUMMARY 🎧Mens rea is the culpable mental state required for a criminal offense, attached to specific statutory elements.
Model Penal Code Culpability Levels:
Purpose: Conduct/result is defendant’s conscious object.
Knowledge: Aware result is practically certain.
Recklessness: Consciously disregards a substantial, unjustifiable risk.
Negligence: Fails to perceive a substantial, unjustifiable risk.
Common Law Categories:
Specific Intent: Requires an objective beyond the act (e.g., attempt, burglary, larceny).
General Intent: Requires intent to perform the prohibited act without additional specialized purpose.
Malice: Reckless disregard of an obvious/serious risk (e.g., murder, arson).
Strict Liability: Dispenses with mens rea for elements (e.g., regulatory offenses).
Transferred Intent: Intent toward intended victim transfers to actual victim.
Concurrence: Mens rea and actus reus must coincide in time.
Mistake of Fact: Negates mens rea. Honest mistakes excuse specific intent; honest and reasonable mistakes excuse general intent.
Mistake of Law: Generally no excuse, with narrow official-reliance or element-negating exceptions.
Willful Blindness: Deliberate avoidance of knowledge when a fact is highly probable.
Tuesday’s complete examination method is therefore:
Parse the statute into elements.
Identify the mens rea applicable to each element.
Distinguish purpose, knowledge, recklessness, and negligence where relevant.
Identify common-law specific intent, general intent, malice, or strict liability where the problem uses those categories.
Determine whether the required mens rea and actus reus concur.
Ask whether mistake of fact or mistake of law negates an element.
Consider willful blindness when D deliberately avoids confirmation of a highly probable fact.
State the conclusion separately for each disputed element.
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