Preterintention

Preterintention, also called preterintentionality, is a criminal law concept describing a case where a person intends to commit one crime but unintentionally ends up committing a more serious offense. The standard example is an unplanned killing that occurs in the course of an attempted robbery, where the killing was not the original intent but the greater harm still results from the underlying wrongful act. The doctrine combines an element of deliberate intent with an element of negligence, placing the offender's culpability between an ordinary intentional crime and a purely negligent one, which in turn affects how severely the offense is sentenced. Though the concept traces back to Roman law and medieval legal traditions, the term itself is now obsolete in English-language law. It survives in the criminal codes of a number of civil law jurisdictions, including Belgium, Brazil, Ecuador, France, Germany, Italy, and Spain, each of which codifies and applies preterintentional liability somewhat differently.