The Illustrated Guide to Criminal Law
Chapter 10: We’ll All Go Down Together
Conspiracy pg 27: The Prosecutor’s Favorite Weapon
Similarly, if Ledway had stolen his second getaway car (instead of trading with Dan), then all of us conspirators would be liable as accomplices in the theft of the car.
Vignette of Ledway speeding away
We’d be liable under that rule even though we had no idea that Ledway was going to do it.
We conspired to commit crime A. Now, when crime B happens as a direct result, it is going to be attributed to all of us.
Average Joe explaining
AVERAGE JOE
No wonder Conspiracy is often called “the prosecutor’s favorite weapon.”
They can charge you even though they can’t prove the “real” crime, and some can charge everyone with everyone else’s acts.
It sounds like a horrible idea really. Charging someone with a crime they didn’t commit, no matter how much evidence there is they didn’t do it. It seems like it would preclude all possibility of defense too, since proving that you didn’t do it doesn’t get you a damn thing. That doesn’t sound like justice to me.
I agree, but maybe the sentence severity would take that into account?
“no matter how much evidence there is they didn’t do it” is naive. The idea is that you shouldn’t have conspired to commit a crime in the first place.
Going back to the earlier chapters on the mens-rea scale – it’s pretty easy to imagine conspiracies having something similar, but it basically starts at Reckless and quickly scales to Knowing. If I commit/plan a robbery, and someone gets hurt or killed in the process by a conspirator, I may not have intended that (I wanted easy cash, not a fight!), and I may not have done that, but maybe I shouldn’t have been planning an action likely to devolve into violence in the first place? It gets worse if, say, I hire someone I know has violent tendencies, or equip them with weaponry (even with an intent not to use it).
If a crime is *truly* disconnected from the original conspiracy – e.g. the ATM robbery in the example story – then sure, a prosecutor trying to slip in conspiracy is on shaky grounds. But in many other cases, it’s hardly unjust.
I guess it depends on how unrelated crime B is to plan A. Once people start deviating from the plan, they are on continuum from “part of crime A” to “unrelated to crime A”. So who gets to decide how related everyone’s actions are?
If one person brought a gun and nobody else did, I would be willing to believe that it was not what everyone else signed up for and would not want to convict them for that part.