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Concept
Transferred intent
Summary
Transferred intent (or transferred mens rea, or transferred malice, in English law) is a legal doctrine that holds that, when the intention to harm one individual inadvertently causes a second person to be hurt instead, the perpetrator is still held responsible. To be held legally responsible, a court typically must demonstrate that the perpetrator had criminal intent (mens rea), that is, that they knew or should have known that another would be harmed by their actions and wanted this harm to occur. For example, if a murderer intends to kill John, but accidentally kills George instead, the intent is transferred from John to George, and the killer is held to have had criminal intent.
Transferred intent also applies to tort law, in which there are generally five areas where transferred intent is applicable: battery, assault, false imprisonment, trespass to land, and trespass to chattels. Generally, any intent to cause any one of these five torts which results in the completion of any of the five tortious acts will be considered an intentional act, even if the actual target of the tort is one other than the intended target of the original tort.
See cases of Carnes v. Thompson, 48 S.W.2d 903 (Mo. 1932) and Bunyan v. Jordan (1937), 57 C.L.R. 1, 37 S.R.N.S.W. 119 for examples.
In US criminal law, transferred intent is sometimes explained by stating that "the intent follows the bullet". That is, the intent to kill person A by gunshot would still apply even if the bullet kills an unintended victim, person B (see mens rea). Thus, the intent is transferred between victims. However, intent only transfers between harms of a similar nature. For example, if the defendant shoots at "Person A" intending to kill "A" but the bullet misses and instead hits a vase, causing it to break, the defendant is not deemed to have intended to break the vase. This is because destruction of property is a kind of harm different from that contemplated by defendant. Vice versa, an attempt to wreck a car, but causing instead a person to be hurt or killed, can only be sentenced for recklessly causing death, i.
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