Information about Willful Blindness

Criminal law
Part of the common law series
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Actus reus  · Causation  · Concurrence
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Intention in English law  · Recklessness
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Ignorantia juris non excusat
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Willful blindness 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.

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.

More recent illustration

From a recent news article about Enron:

Joel M. Androphy, a Houston trial lawyer and author of books on white-collar crime, argued that prosecutors got off to a decent start.

"We have to assume that Koenig was the government's best fact witness" and the one "least tainted by the activities of Enron," Mr. Androphy said. His testimony showed that Mr. Lay and Mr. Skilling "decided to close their eyes to what was occurring inside Enron and not take any corrective action."

Under the legal concept of "willful blindness," Mr. Androphy argued, the men could be convicted without a smoking-gun meeting or other eyewitness to a crime being discussed.

For Enron, Unwitting Assistance
By ALEXEI BARRIONUEVO
New York Times, February 14, 2006

References

• Luban, Contrived Ignorance, (1999) Vol. 87 Georgetown Law Journal, 957.