Criminal law
Part of the common law series
Element (criminal law)
Actus reus · Mens rea
Causation · Concurrence
Scope of criminal liability
Complicity · Corporate · Vicarious
Inchoate offenses
Attempt · Conspiracy · Solicitation
Offence against the person
Assault · Battery
False imprisonment · Kidnapping
Mayhem · Sexual assault
Crimes against property
Arson · Blackmail · Burglary
Embezzlement · Extortion
False pretenses · Larceny
Receiving stolen property
Robbery · Theft
Crimes against justice
Compounding · Misprision
Obstruction · Perjury
Malfeasance in office
Perverting the course of justice
Defenses to liability
Defense of self
Defence of property
Consent · Diminished responsibility
Duress · Entrapment
Ignorantia juris non excusat
Infancy · Insanity
Intoxication defense
Justification · Mistake (of law)
Necessity · Provocation
Other common law areas
Contracts · Evidence · Property
Torts · Wills, trusts and estates
Portals
Criminal justice · Law
Willful blindness (sometimes called ignorance of law, willful ignorance or contrived ignorance) is a term used in law to describe a situation in which an individual seeks to avoid civil or criminal liability for a wrongful act by intentionally putting himself in a position where he will be unaware of facts which would render him liable. For example, in a number of cases, persons transporting packages containing illegal drugs have asserted that they never asked what the contents of the packages were, and therefore lacked the requisite intent to break the law. Such defenses have not succeeded, as courts have been quick to determine that the defendant should have known what was in the package, and exercised criminal recklessness by failing to find out before delivering it.[citation needed]
A famous example of such a defense being denied occurred in In re Aimster Copyright Litigation, 334 F.3d 643 (7th Cir. 2003), in which the defendants argued that their file-swapping technology was designed in such a way that they had no way of monitoring the content of swapped files, and suggested that their inability to monitor the activities of users meant that they could not be contributing to copyright infringement by the users. The court held that this was willful blindness on the defendant's part, and would not constitute a defense to a claim of contributory infringement.
References
- Luban, Contrived Ignorance, (1999) Vol. 87 Georgetown Law Journal, 957.