Introduction

Simple Assault by Bodily Injury

Introduction

Section 211.1 of the Model Penal Code gathers the law of physical attacks under a single label. Its first subsection opens with the lead-in "A person is guilty of assault if he:" and then lists the ways of committing simple assault as alternatives.¹ The first alternative, paragraph (a), reaches a person who "attempts to cause or purposely, knowingly or recklessly causes bodily injury to another."² Those words contain three components: an attempt, a choice among three culpable mental states, and a result, bodily injury. The rest of § 211.1 surrounds paragraph (a) with other offenses, including a weapons offense, a menace offense, a grading sentence, and a separate aggravated assault subsection, but this chapter stays with paragraph (a) until its parts are fully worked out and turns to its neighbors only at the end.³

Paragraph (a) does the work that older law divided between two offenses. Where injury actually results, it covers what lawyers call battery, and where the actor tries to cause injury and fails, it covers attempted battery.⁴ Because both situations sit inside one sentence of the Code, a blow that lands and a blow that misses are the same offense, and the outcome decides only which clause of the paragraph the prosecution relies on.

That structure dictates the first analytic step. The reader looks at what the defendant did to, or tried to do to, the victim's body, and then asks what mental state accompanied it. If injury was caused, the question becomes whether the defendant acted purposely, knowingly, or recklessly as to that injury. If injury was only attempted, the attempt half of the paragraph applies instead.⁵ The vocabulary most students carry into this topic comes from the common law, and the Model Penal Code is a model that legislatures adopt, adapt, or reject in drafting their own codes.⁶ The next section therefore begins with that common-law background and shows how § 211.1 replaces the old split between assault and battery with one assault label.