Assisted Mock
How would you defend a machine in court?
Now yes this sounds a little crazy, and it is, but for a school project my team has to create, in a mock-trial-like scenario, a defense for a Terminator. The crime was assisting in the escape of a man legally arrested. The Terminator in question was sent back from the future to fulfill a mission involving the protection of said man, and the crime was committed without any knowledge that it was a crime.
As weird as this is, we still need a legal defense. The best we have devised so far is diminished capacity, the terminator not capable of knowing it was breaking the law. At this point, any logical defense is sufficient.
In many jurisdictions the legal definition of insanity is that the accused must know the difference between right and wrong. Those are moral concepts, it’s not the difference between legal and illegal. A machine is not capable of knowing right or wrong (as opposed to legal or illegal), and would by definition be insane.
Further machines would presumably be incapable of generating a criminal intent. There is usually a presumption of intent when committing a crime, though intent can be used in different senses but I am sure that since Terminator was following programming installed by others, it is not capable of forming the requisite intent.
A prior answer has also got some of it — most statutes say “any person who…” does certain things is guilty of a crime, It must be determined tha the Terminator is a person for the law to apply to it. I don’t know that there is a legal definition of person though. Corporations are persons under US law (not so in every nation).
I would argue that the ability to chose is a fundamental characteriztic of personhood, and Terminator does not have the freedom of will to choose its actions. In classic religious doctine that would be the case as well, freedom of choice, free will, is essential to sin. Terminator cannot sin (ignore the question of whether it has a soul) because it does not possess free will. So too it cannot be a person or commit a crime. (Ask your opponent to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Terminator is a person).
(BTW that may NOT be true of skynet, can’t say for sure…)
Spring Assisted Mock Stiletto