What Is Willful Blindness
Meaning of willful blindness.
What is willful blindness. Willful blindness also referred to as deliberate ignorance willful ignorance and conscious avoidance is a criminal state of mind that translates to putting your head in the sand. What is willful blindness. However if everyone practices willful blindness about the issue of climate change then climate catastrophe for most on the planet will lie ahead.
Complement it with npr science correspondent shankar vedantam s the hidden brain and rebecca solnit s manifesto for welcoming the unknown. Willful blindness describes a situation where a person intentionally avoids learning of facts or occurrences so as to avoid criminal or civil liability. Willful blindness is a provocative and necessary read from cover to cover.
Information and translations of willful blindness in the most comprehensive dictionary definitions resource on the web. Lawyers call it the ostrich instruction and despite its arguable justification it is a well established aspect of federal criminal law. Willful blindness or wilful blindness sometimes called ignorance of law.
Willful blindness is a term used in criminal law to refer to the acts of a person who intentionally fails to be informed about matters that would make the person criminally liable. Then and now willful blindness was a concept that should send shivers down the spines of any executive. Legal definition of willful blindness.
An example of this would be a case where someone transporting illegal drugs tries to claim innocence by not looking in the package and thus not knowing that he was transporting drugs. To use the example of drug smugglers again if someone leaves a bag unattended in a hotel room and a hotel staffer sneaks drugs into the bag with the intent of having someone at traveler s destination take the bag to get the drugs the person is genuinely acting as an unwitting carrier. What does willful blindness mean.
The legal concept of willful blindness originated in the nineteenth century. Deliberate failure to make a reasonable inquiry of wrongdoing as drug dealing in one s house despite suspicion or an awareness of the high probability of its existence. 761 willful ignorance or contrived ignorance or intentional ignorance or nelsonian knowledge is a term used in law to describe a situation in which a person seeks to avoid civil or criminal liability for a wrongful act by intentionally keeping themself unaware of facts that would render him or her liable or implicated.
Distinguishing willful blindness can be important.
