Cite as: 526 U. S. 1 (1999)
Scalia, J., dissenting
when that was entirely unnecessary to the crime. I have a friend whose father was killed, and whose mother was nearly killed, in just such an incident—after the car had already been handed over. It is not at all implausible that Congress should direct its attention to this particularly savage sort of carjacking—where killing the driver is part of the intended crime.2
Indeed, it seems to me much more implausible that Congress would have focused upon the ineffable "conditional intent" that the Court reads into the statute, sending courts and juries off to wander through "would-a, could-a, should-a" land. It is difficult enough to determine a defendant's actual intent; it is infinitely more difficult to determine what the defendant planned to do upon the happening of an event that the defendant hoped would not happen, and that he himself may not have come to focus upon. There will not often be the accomplice's convenient confirmation of conditional intent that exists in the present case. Presumably it will be up to each jury whether to take the carjacker ("Your car or
2 Note that I am discussing what was a plausible congressional purpose in enacting this language—not what I necessarily think was the real one. I search for a plausible purpose because a text without one may represent a "scrivener's error" that we may properly correct. See Green v. Bock Laundry Machine Co., 490 U. S. 504, 528-529 (1989) (Scalia, J., concurring in judgment); see also United States v. X-Citement Video, Inc., 513 U. S. 64, 82 (1994) (Scalia, J., dissenting). There is no need for such correction here; the text as it reads, unamended by a meaning of "intent" that contradicts normal usage, makes total sense. If I were to speculate as to the real reason the "intent" requirement was added by those who drafted it, I think I would select neither the Court's attribution of purpose nor the one I have hypothesized. Like the District Court, see 921 F. Supp. 155, 158 (EDNY 1996), and the Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, see United States v. Anderson, 108 F. 3d 478, 482-483 (1997), I suspect the "intent" requirement was inadvertently expanded beyond the new subsection 2119(3), which imposed the death penalty—where it was thought necessary to ensure the constitutionality of that provision. Of course the actual intent of the draftsmen is irrelevant; we are governed by what Congress enacted.
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