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Mere Preparation

  • Murat C. Mungan EMAIL logo
Published/Copyright: September 14, 2017
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Abstract

Acts that are merely in preparation for the commission of a crime are not punished in many jurisdictions. This article provides a wrongful-imprisonment-cost-minimization based justification for this practice. It highlights that conceiving of sufficient proximity based on the trade-off between error-costs and deterrence-benefits may be a more useful alternative to conceptions that rely on physical or temporal proximity to define merely preparatory acts.

JEL Classification: K00; K14; K42

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Published Online: 2017-09-14

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