Opinion ID: 1148992
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: GENERAL vs. SPECIFIC

Text: In State v. Stasio, 78 N.J. 467, 396 A.2d 1129 (1979), the New Jersey Supreme Court grappled with the distinction between specific and general intent. Quoting Professor Hall's treatise, the court reasoned: The current confusion resulting from diverse uses of general intent is aggravated by dubious efforts to differentiate that from specific intent. Each crime ... has its distinctive mens rea, e.g., intending to have forced intercourse, intending to break and enter a dwelling-house and to commit a crime there, intending to inflict a battery, and so on. It is evident that there must be as many mentes reae as there are crimes. And whatever else may be said about an intention, an essential characteristic of it is that it is directed toward a definite end. To assert therefore that an intention is specific is to employ a superfluous term just as if one were to speak of a voluntary act. Id. at 1132-33 (quoting Jerome Hall, General Principles of Criminal Law 142 (2d ed.1960)). The New Jersey high court went on to explain that: [D]istinguishing between specific and general intent gives rise to incongruous results by irrationally allowing intoxication to excuse some crimes but not others. In some instances if the defendant is found incapable of formulating the specific intent necessary for the crime charged, such as assault with intent to rob, he may be convicted of a lesser included general intent crime, such as assault with a deadly weapon. In other cases there may be no related general intent offense so that intoxication would lead to acquittal.... ... [W]here the more serious offense requires only a general intent, such as rape, intoxication provides no defense, whereas it would be a defense to an attempt to rape, specific intent being an element of that offense. Yet the same logic and reasoning which impels exculpation due to the failure of specific intent to commit an offense would equally compel the same result when a general intent is an element of the offense. Stasio, 396 A.2d at 1133-34 (citations omitted). [17] Like the New Jersey Supreme Court, other courts have been equally critical of the nebulous distinction between specific and general intent. The California Supreme Court has stated that [t]oo often the characterization of a particular crime as one of specific or general intent is determined solely by the presence or absence of words describing psychological phenomena'intent' or `malice' for examplein the statutory language of defining the crime. People v. Hood, 1 Cal.3d 444, 82 Cal.Rptr. 618, 462 P.2d 370, 377-78 (1969). Even the United States Supreme Court has recognized that the mental element in criminal law encompasses more than the two possibilities of `specific' and `general' intent. See Liparota v. United States, 471 U.S. 419, 423 n. 5, 105 S.Ct. 2084, 2087 n. 5, 85 L.Ed.2d 434 (1985). Indeed, the Court has explained that: This ambiguity [in the terms specific intent and general intent] has led to a movement away from the traditional dichotomy of intent and toward an alternative analysis of mens rea. This new approach [is] exemplified by the American Law Institute's Model Penal Code.... .... ... [T]here is [an] ambiguity inherent in the traditional distinction between specific intent and general intent. Generally, even time-honored common-law crimes consist of several elements, and complex statutorily defined crimes exhibit this characteristic to an even greater degree. Is the same state of mind required of the actor for each element of the crime, or may some elements require one state of mind and some another? ... [C]lear analysis requires that the question of the kind of culpability required to establish the commission of an offense be faced separately with respect to each material element of the crime. United States v. Bailey, 444 U.S. 394, 403-06, 100 S.Ct. 624, 631-33, 62 L.Ed.2d 575 (1980) (quoting Model Penal Code § 2.02 comments at 123 (Tentative Draft No. 4, 1955)). Consistent with the views expressed above, Professors LaFave and Scott suggest an alternative method for evaluating the effect of voluntary intoxication on a defendant's ability to exhibit the requisite mens rea of a particular crime: [I]t may be said that it is better, when considering the effect of the defendant's voluntary intoxication upon his criminal liability, to stay away from those misleading concepts of general intent and specific intent. Instead one should ask, first, what intent (or knowledge) if any does the crime in question require; and, then, if the crime requires some intent (knowledge), did the defendant in fact entertain such an intent (or, did he in fact know what the crime requires him to know.) 1 Wayne R. LaFave & Austin W. Scott, Jr., Substantive Criminal Law § 4.10 at 554 (1986). [18] In a sense we are already moving in this direction. For example, we recently held that the State was required to prove that the defendant knowingly possessed illegal drugs even though the applicable statute did not specifically include a scienter requirement. Chicone v. State, 684 So.2d 736, 744 (Fla. 1996). We reasoned that if the legislature had intended to make criminals out of people who were wholly ignorant of the offending characteristics of items in their possession, and subject them to lengthy prison terms, it would have spoken more clearly to that effect. Id. at 743. Accordingly, we concluded that it was the legislature's intent to prohibit the knowing possession of illicit items and to prevent persons from doing so by attaching a substantial criminal penalty to such conduct. Id. at 744. In the end, we found that [s]ilence does not suggest that the legislature dispensed with scienter here. Id. We have also recently decided in Thompson v. State, 695 So.2d 691 (Fla.1997), that a defendant must be aware that his intended victim is a police officer, before he can be convicted of attempted murder of a police officer.