This paper proposes a unified framework for grading criminal liability in incomplete offences, grounded in the concept of legitimate ownership and the progressive commitment of the agent's will through the executory sequence. Every human action, it is argued, belongs to a domain of ownership recognised by law — encompassing ownership of self, time, and property. An act becomes legally significant when it is directed toward altering the state of another person's domain without consent. At that point the agent either enters execution in the sense articulated by Duff or reaches what doctrine identifies as the last act. Between the initiation of execution and the final act lies a sequence of discrete acts of will, each of which represents both a reaffirmation of intent and a retained opportunity for voluntary withdrawal. On this basis, culpability is not binary but accumulative: each successive act of will increases the agent's responsibility for the pending outcome and, correspondingly, the appropriate sanction. The decisive threshold is the final act of will — defined not as the chronologically last act before interception, but as the act which, absent external intervention, would be sufficient to complete the unlawful change in another's domain given the actual state of the world. A perpetrator intercepted at that point should bear full liability for the completed offence. Earlier interceptions attract proportionally reduced sanctions, calibrated by the ratio of acts of will performed to the total required for completion. The framework replaces the indeterminate proximity judgments that characterise existing doctrine with a precise, arithmetically tractable structure grounded in ownership, execution, and the progressive engagement of the will.
Nuridin-Amin Nashipu (Sat,) studied this question.