body: I would have thought this would've been asked already, but I searched this site and the Internet, and I couldn't find anything. Apologies if this is a duplicate.
  
  
  As computers become increasingly autonomous, there have already been a handful of incidents where computers have done things that would be criminal for a person to do. For example, a self-driving car killed a pedestrian, and a Twitter bot made a death threat. Moreover, both of these computers were essentially operating under their own decision-making processes and were not directly controlled by any human.
  
  
  Could it be possible for prosecutors to file criminal charges against a computer? Is there some standard of sentience that the computer would have to achieve in order to indict it?
  (United States)
  
  
  
title: Could You Indict a Computer?