A man in Las Vegas has been arrested and charged with attempted murder. The strange thing is that the person he attempted to murder was a dummy set up by the police in a sting operation. The man, 30-year-old Shane Allen Schindler, is now undergoing a competency evaluation to determine his mental state.
The real question now is whether you can be charged with a crime that is technically impossible to commit. While his lawyer says no, there is current precedent in the sate of Nevada, going back to 1976, where the state supreme court rejected a similar appeal.
Deborah Denno, a Fordham University law professor shared her opinion on the matter.
“You can’t murder a mannequin,” Denno agreed. “But if the facts were as he believed them to be, he would have been bashing the head of a human being.”
To that end, investigators claim there’s no way he could have known that he wasn’t trying to kill a human with his 4 lb hammer.
It will be interesting to see what the court decides.