Culpable Mental State

One of my coworkers was arrested a few years back. No, it wasn't some scandal involving him embezzling from the county coffers, or an incident of him stomping on an already-in-custody arrestee. He was cited and released for a loose dog.

Here's what happened. He went out in the backyard and noticed his dog had gotten out. He immediately began to scour the neighborhood for the absconding canine. About the same time he caught up with his dog, the animal control guy slipped up and wrote him a citation for having a dog not on a leash. This is actually considered a criminal offense in our county. With only a fine of Twenty-five dollars, he had a criminal record.

The reason he could be charged with this, even though he had no intention of letting the dog out, is because of the culpable mental state that is required to violate this law. Culpable mental state (cms) is the state of mind you are in with regards to the offense you are committing.

The cms for the leash law must be the one defined as negligent. This cms simply reflects that we were not as careful as we should have been in order to prevent the offense from occurring.

Another cms in Arizona law is reckless. This is when you should have known that your actions could or would lead to the offense or injury. For instance, you are playing with a samurai sword at the mall, just for fun, and you accidentally slice off the head of some emo kid that was listening to strange music on his ipod. You should have known that this could happen so, under a law that looks for reckless as the cms, you are guilty.

A final cms is knowingly. In other words, you deliberately committed the offense and knew what the result would be. An example would be if you deliberately snuck into Billy's house and took his Call of Duty game and sold it at Bookman's for $3.00 in trade credit. You did it knowingly.

Some crimes don't require a cms at all in our fine state. If you are littering, it doesn't matter if you did it knowingly, recklessly, negligently, accidentally or any-ingly. You are guilty if you did it at all.

Sometimes I wonder what our Culpable Mental State is in our approach to life. Do we take a deliberate run at it, knowingly defining our purpose and choosing what we do based on that? Do we not put the care into it that we should and negligently let it slip away from us? Do we recklessly do stuff that we should know will make a mess for us, but do that stuff anyway? Or, do we not give it any thought at all and wonder why it ends up the way it does?