Modeling Last-Act Attempted Crime in Criminal Law

Abstract

An attempt to commit a crime, regardless of the outcome of the attempt, is itself a criminal offence, particularly in the case of serious crimes. An open issue in the study of Artificial intelligence and Law is whether the law of attempt could be formally modeled. The crime of attempt requires to prove two aspects which are intentions and some conduct towards completion of the crime. It has always been a problem to distinguish a border line between mere preparation and actual initiation of the attempt. Several legal tests have been developed to distinguish whether the defendant’s act is the criminal act to constitute an attempt of an indictable offence. The Last Act Test is the strictest standard of such test. This dissertation proposes a formal model of the last act test of the law of attempt based on a modular assumption based argumentation framework. We implement the proposed model using answer set programming and test the developed system on a real U.K. court case.