The Reflex of Intent

There's a great film by Benuel called the criminal life of Archibalda de la Cruz in which this central character has malicious intentions. He tries to kill a number of people but by chance those people get killed in other ways just at the point where he's about to kill them. Now he's got the intent but not the outcome. So we tested cases that have just that structure. And what we discovered is that if coincidentally the person dies you give even less punishment to the attempt. For the coincidence happening suddenly you're let off the hook completely as opposed to at least getting a little bit of punishment for being an attempted murderer.