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Default Culpability Requirements: The Model Penal Code And Beyond, Scott England
Default Culpability Requirements: The Model Penal Code And Beyond, Scott England
Faculty Scholarship
This Article examines section 2.02(3) of the Model Penal Code, both as proposed by the ALI and as modified by MPC states, and recommends new default culpability rules to replace it.
The Model Penal Code’s default culpability provision, Section 2.02(3), plays a central but often overlooked role in the Code’s celebrated culpability scheme. Section 2.02(3) “reads in” a requirement of recklessness when an offense is silent about the mental state required for an offense element. The provision has profound implications for criminal law because thousands of state offenses fail to prescribe culpability requirements. Without a default culpability rule like Section …
Detecting Mens Rea In The Brain, Owen D. Jones, Read Montague, Gideon Yaffe
Detecting Mens Rea In The Brain, Owen D. Jones, Read Montague, Gideon Yaffe
Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications
What if the widely used Model Penal Code (MPC) assumes a distinction between mental states that doesn’t actually exist? The MPC assumes, for instance, that there is a real distinction in real people between the mental states it defines as “knowing” and “reckless.” But is there?
If there are such psychological differences, there must also be brain differences. Consequently, the moral legitimacy of the Model Penal Code’s taxonomy of culpable mental states – which punishes those in defined mental states differently – depends on whether those mental states actually correspond to different brain states in the way the MPC categorization …