Empty Pockets, Umbrellas, and “Imaginary Crimes”: A Content Analysis of Canadian, New Zealand, and Australian Case Law on Impossibility in Criminal Attempts
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Historically, offences considered “impossible” of commission have been problematic for the law of attempts. In particular, there is no consensus as to whether there is a legally relevant difference between the concepts of “factual impossibility” and “legal impossibility.” This is significant not only because it possesses implications for legal and moral responsibility, but also because it highlights uncertainty in the law. The current study examines how impossibility affects judicial decision-making in criminal attempt cases. A qualitative content analysis was conducted on case law from three Commonwealth countries: Canada, New Zealand, and Australia. The results indicate that inconsistency in the approach adopted towards impossibility attempts is a consequence of differing doctrinal frameworks. Because Canada and Australia generally adopt the subjective approach (in contrast to New Zealand, which generally adopts the objective approach), it is not surprising that they rely on consequentialist rather than retributivist rationales of punishment. Furthermore, despite being criticized as an area of law based on “abstract conceptions,” this study demonstrates that impossibility cases raise broader social policy issues.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.015 | 0.050 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.011 | 0.012 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.020 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".