LawByLak — Topic 20: Attempts (OCR H418, Paper 1)

Attempts

One line of statute decides everything. More than merely preparatory, and no case has ever managed to say where that line falls.

23 authorities in full · 34 spec checkpoints · 35 flashcards · 6 model answers from Level 2 to Level 4 · 1 real past paper, worked incident by incident, with OCR’s own marking content as a self-marking checklist

Attempts is the shortest topic on the paper and one of the most commonly lost. Everything turns on section 1(1) of the Criminal Attempts Act 1981 and a phrase Parliament never defined, so the marks are not in reciting the test. They are in arguing where a particular act sits on the spectrum, and then doing it again for the next incident.

What is inside

• The preparation spectrum, from Gullefer and Campbell at one end through Geddes and Tosti to Jones, so you can place a new act rather than guess at it.
• Why attempted murder demands more than murder. Whybrow is the single most useful sentence in the topic: nothing less than an intention to kill will do.
• Impossibility, settled. Anderton v Ryan, then Shivpuri departing from it within about a year, and why section 1(3) is the belief-deeming provision that makes section 1(2) work rather than a second rule.
• The circumstance question, Khan and the Attorney-General’s Reference against Pace and Rogers, which is where the law is genuinely unsettled.
• An interactive crossing-the-line sorter, ten acts to place with an immediate verdict naming the authority, and a self-marking past paper that tells you whether your problem is knowledge or segmentation.
• Twenty-three authorities, court stated for all of them and facts for all but one, with three researched from the law reports rather than left blank.

Where OCR’s own materials go wrong

Three problems in OCR’s published documents are flagged to you rather than quietly cleaned: a garbled case list in the AO1 content, a date conflict on the Attorney-General’s Reference resolved in the mark scheme’s favour, and a contradiction on conditional intent. R v Widdowson is listed by OCR first under Intention when the case is actually an actus reus authority, and this guide says so, keeps it where OCR puts it so you can still match the mark scheme, and tells you what to cite instead.

What we will not pretend

Attempts has been examined once: June 2022, Question 9, twenty marks, AO1 8 and AO2 12. No exemplar exists for it. Attempts is not named in the specification’s evaluation strand, which lists non-fatal offences, intoxication, self-defence, consent and ideas for reform, so it cannot be set as an essay. The evaluation and reform material here is built as enrichment, every block says so on its face, and it is pointed at the papers where it can actually earn you marks rather than sold as attempts revision.

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