Do or do not, there is no "try": An exploratory quasi-experimental study of intuitions of justice applied to attempt and completion of the crime of homicide

Abstract

An emerging debate in criminal law concerns whether the penal system should integrate the community’s intuitions of justice. Using a sample of 659 participants, this study aims to analyse different intuitions of justice related to different stages of attempts and completion of homicide as well as to evaluate whether legal training modifies these intuitions. The results suggest that participants grade differently both criminal liability and formal sanction associated with different scenarios and that specialized legal knowledge has no relevance to the intuitive distribution of these variables. We conclude by analysing some of the implications of these results for the development of criminal legislative policy.

Keywords

• intuitions of justice
• attempt
• completion
• empirical methodologies
• quasi-experimental designs