Preterintention
having committed an involuntary crime that was more serious than the crime that was intended
Preterintention (or preterintentionality) is a feature of criminal law in several legal traditions that describes a situation wherein a criminal perpetrator intends to commit a crime, but unintentionally commits a crime of greater severity than the one they originally intended. For example, an unintentional homicide committed during an attempted robbery.
The concept occurs in various European and Latin American legal systems, including Belgium, Brazil, Ecuador, France, Germany, Italy, and Spain, but the term is obsolete in English.
History
The concept of preterintention has roots in Roman law, and was also known in the Middle Ages.
By country
Belgium
In Belgian law, every criminal offense has a "moral element" (French: élément morale) or type of intent, which affects the level of criminal responsibility that can be imputed to the perpetrator. The moral element is subdivided into four types: general intent (dol général), specific intent (dol spéciale), negligence (faute) with or without premeditation, and a fourth type, known as preterintentional offenses (infractions praeter-intentionelles).
Preterintentional offenses have combined elements of both dol (intent) and faute (negligence). The classic example is in article 401 of the Belgian criminal code:
When blows or injuries are inflicted intentionally, but without the intention of causing death, and nevertheless result in death, the guilty party shall be punished by imprisonment for a term of five to ten years.
Belgium has a unique case of preterintentional offense regarding pharmaceuticals or other potentially toxic substances in article 402 of the code. This article lays out specific criminal penalties for anyone who, without intending to kill, intentionally injects or administers any medication or substance that is potentially lethal or could have serious consequences to health, and without intending to, ends up causing the recipient to become sick or incapacitated and unable to work.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Preterintention” is having committed an involuntary crime that was more serious than the crime that was intended. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Preterintention, having and committed, not as a finished interpretation.
Why this record matters
The phrase “having committed an involuntary crime that was more serious than the crime that was intended” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 19, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q883918. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Preterintention” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.