Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Enchanted Trinkets Complete--a hardcover book containing over 500 magic items for your D&D games!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9831563" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Er, well...no. Intent absolutely matters, that's why we care about mens rea ("guilty mind") and actus reus ("guilty act"). If intent mattered more than anything else, then evil or unlawful intent would be more important than someone actually, y'know, committing the crime; you could be arrested simply for wanting to commit a crime, since that's intent.Intent without action is irrelevant, and action without intent is not culpable (though there are specific crimes with lower standards of intent--e.g. the difference between manslaughter and murder.) Only intent and action, together, count. Hence, it can't be true that intent matters more than anything else. It's co-equal with actually doing the deed.Plenty of people do! Tons of homicides--situations where humans kill other humans, regardless of other details--are never punished, because there isn't enough evidence to secure a conviction. Because the police and AG being so certain that X person committed a crime is not actually good reason to say that X did do it, and a bunch of people have been wrongly convicted because illegally overzealous prosecutors/investigators manufactured evidence to convict someone.Even beyond that, trials are long, expensive, and not guaranteed to win. A lot of crimes, especially "neutral" ones like what you speak of here (I don't agree with your characterization, but my disagreement would require nuance and thus be too long to address here), get wiped away with plea deals, settlements, or other arrangements without anyone ever going to trial. Hell, a bunch of outright EVIL acts never get punished for the same reason. There's a prominent case frequently discussed in the news right now, where a certain infamous individual got a plea deal in the early 2000s despite not stopping the grotesquely evil deeds, which resulted in this individual being functionally not even slightly punished despite their obvious, provable guilt.</blockquote>

Verification