I feel like this is really stretching the concept of ‘no stupid questions’, but anyway, here we are:
Let’s say someone is given a button, and are told that if they press the button, a specific person will die. They firmly believe this to be the case. They consciously choose to press the button, fully intending that the outcome is that the specified person dies - they desire that outcome, and make a conscious decision in an attempt to carry it out.
However, the button does nothing. It wasn’t hooked up to anything, it was just a random button. There was never any chance of anyone dying from this interaction.
Is the person who pressed the button guilty of attempted murder?
A very basic layman’s terms description of attempted murder (from the top result in a search) is:
Attempted murder is the failed or aborted attempt to murder another person. Just like other crimes, attempted murder consists of both an action and an intention. In attempted murder, a person must take a direct step towards the killing and must have the specific intent to kill that person.
It sounds like those criteria have been met in this case. Have they been? If not, why not?
Would the answer be different if the subject was told that (for example) the button controlled an explosive device in the intended victim’s car, or some other very specific effect that pressing it would have, versus simply that it would cause them to die in a nebulous, unspecified way?
An alternate version of the scenario: What if the person buys a ‘Death Note’ notebook, fully believes that it is real and will work, and writes someone’s name in it with the intent to kill them?
Everybody here is kinda right, but there are other factors to consider, and the net result is that it’s usually not a case worth bringing.
The “Impossibility” defense says that in most cases, the “factual” impossibility of committing the crime is not a defense, but taking an action that is not a crime is a defense, and if raised must be proved by the prosecution. Even with “Factual,” the line gets muddy (the article cites a person whose appeal won after they were convicted of poaching after shooting a stuffed deer). Many jurisdictions have a “reasonable person” standard for that as well, where if the act is the sort of thing that might normally be expected to result in a crime (the most infamous case is two US military personnel who thought they were raping a passed out woman, but really she had died from a heart attack) then you get no benefit, but if no reasonable person would believe that their action would do anything, then it’s more likely to succeed. To answer one of your questions, being told the button sets off a bomb would be more problematic for our hypothetical asshole than being told it “just kills” somebody that would be a bigger problem than a Death Note notebook, but it’s not a simple yes/no.
So anyway, this then raises some questions. Was this button setup convincing? Who did the convincing? Why did they do so? Other defenses might arise out of these conditions: e.g. they were told that pushing the button would save a bunch of other people, trolley-problem style, or it was the police egging them on and telling them they needed to for XYZ good reason. Many of them will turn on the defendant’s thoughts, so in any jurisdiction where they are not obligated to testify (e.g. the United States), our very interesting defendant simply doesn’t, and their attorney argues that there’s reasonable doubt they thought the button would actually do anything.
Add on top of this prosecutorial discretion. A prosecutor knows all of this, and knows this is a loser of a case, so apart from truly bonkers hypothetical, they will not bring it.
TL;DR: By the letter of the law, very probably yes, but no one will ever get convicted for it.