Transferred intent

Transferred intent (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 under the law, usually the court must demonstrate that the person has criminal intent, that is, that the person knew another would be harmed by his or her actions and wanted this harm to occur. 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 tort law, there are generally five areas in which 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, (1932) Supreme Court of Missouri. 48 S.W. 2d 903 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 with a bullet will apply even when the bullet kills the 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. The rationale underlying this distinction is that the defendant has only one intent. If the law were to deem that the defendant intended to destroy property, it would be placing on him an intent he never had—he would now have both the intent to kill and the intent to destroy property. In contrast, where the defendant intends to kill one person but ends up killing another, there's still only one intent—the intent to kill.

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