A Philippine Crime

            A crime is an act committed or omitted that violates a public law that is commanding or forbidding it. Crimes include those which are mala in se or wrongful in nature and those which are mala prohibitia or prohibited by a certain law.

            An act needs to have an intent and effect in order for it to be considered as a crime, meaning that a person has to have a malicious or evil intent and he has to manifest this intent into a physical action. These two also denote the two major parts of a crime, the internal act and the external act. As an absolute rule in Philippine law, a person cannot be labeled as a criminal and be put to jail for procuring malicious thoughts about stealing or killing a person. This is so because the mind of a person is far beyond the sphere of our Philippine penal laws. Next are the external acts. These acts are the products of having these criminal thoughts and these are the ones that can tag a person as a criminal. 

            These external acts are further divided into the preparatory acts and the acts of execution. Ordinarily, preparatory acts are not punishable by law since they are not yet deemed to be an act with a connection to committing a crime. Preparatory acts include buying poison intended for rats, carrying inflammable objects, or carrying a weapon. These do not constitute even the first stage of committing a crime. Acts of execution are the ones which are punishable under the Revised Penal Code (RPC) of the Philippines. 

            There are three stages under an act of execution, namely the attempted, frustrated, and consummated. An attempted crime or felony is one where the offender attempts to begin the commission of a crime, yet is not able to perform all the acts necessary to produce the crime. This non-performance of all the acts is due to forces or causes than the offender’s own desistance. A perfect example of this is one party inducing a second party to kill a third party, which the second party refuses. This is attempted homicide.

            The frustrated stage happens when a person has performed all of the acts needed to produce the crime and nothing more is left to be done, but is not able to produce said crime due to causes beyond the will of the perpetrator. For example, a person, X fired a killing shot from a pistol to another person, Z. Z is supposed to be dead, yet he was rushed to the nearest hospital and got immediate medical attention. X performed everything that needs to produce homicide yet due to the intervention of a doctor, Z is still alive. This is a case of frustrated homicide. 

            A consummated crime is one where all the acts are performed and the crime is produced. In short, it is what you can call a successful crime. An example is successfully stealing money from a bank or another person, murder, and rape.