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Conspiracy, in Anglo-American law, an agreement between two or more persons to commit an unlawful act or to accomplish a lawful end by unlawful means. This definition is delusively simple, however, for each of its terms is subject to wide interpretation. Conspiracy is perhaps the most amorphous area in Anglo-American criminal law. Its terms are vaguer and more elastic than any conception of conspiracy to be found in the continental European codes or their imitators. In most civil-law countries, the punishment of agreements to commit offenses, irrespective of whether the criminal purpose was attempted or executed, is largely confined to political offenses against the state.
Since a conspiratorial agreement to obtain a legal end may be illegal in Anglo-American law, it is clear that the focus of this law is on the agreement itself, on the form it may take, and the scope of its operation. Generally, there is no particular form that the agreement must take to constitute conspiracy. Although many statutes now require an overt act as proof of an agreement to commit a felony, conspiracy is still largely inferred from circumstantial evidence. Thus, individual conspirators need not even know of the existence or the identity of all the other conspirators. Two persons may be found to have conspired with each other simply by making separate agreements with a third party.
Once a person has entered into an agreement, it is very difficult to limit the scope of his liability for the acts of others included in the conspiracy. Courts and statutes increasingly emphasize that proof of an agreement must be related to a specific crime. But often, conspiratorial organizations conduct a business rather than commit a single offense; for example, a “chain conspiracy” involves several transactions all directed to a common unlawful objective, such as trafficking in illegal narcotics, which are brought into the country by smugglers, who• sell them to middlemen, who, in turn, sell them to retailers. The courts differ as to what extent a party at one end of the chain should be liable for the acts of the parties at the other end. Also, in a “hub conspiracy,” a single man, or “hub,” such as a “fence” for stolen goods, makes separate illegal transactions with persons who have no knowledge of the others.
Some courts would hold a pickpocket liable for the acts of an armed bank robber if they both disposed of their goods through the same fence.
Such reasoning has justification. It is argued, first, that conspiracies are an especial threat to society because of the greater power that lies in numbers and the pooling of talents. It is also said that the formation of a group impedes detection, because evidence of the conspiracy is limited to the conspirators themselves, whose reluctance to testify in court increases with the size of the group. Finally, it is speculated that the very act of agreement crystallizes and hardens the purposes of men who alone might be less resolute.
Others argue that the Anglo-American concept of conspiracy is too elastic to prevent injustice. No continental country permits conviction for conspiracy if the aim of the agreement is itself legal. In the U.S. a few jurisdictions have reformed the traditional concept in response to increasing criticism of it.
Whereas it is common in the U.S. to punish a conspiracy to commit an offense more harshly than the commission of the offense itself, the state of Illinois has followed the European example of making the punishment for conspiracy the same as or less than that for the offense itself. Also, instead of adding the punishment for conspiracy to that for the separate crime, Illinois requires that punishment be given for one offense or the other but not both. The harshness of the traditional rule was mitigated by the doctrine that if one of the necessary parties to a conspiracy could not be convicted, the other party could not be convicted either. In some jurisdictions the rule has been dropped so that a party may be guilty of conspiracy regardless of the status of his partner. Conspiracies that relate to political offenses and to economic warfare between businesses and between management and labour are usually regulated by statute. But the concept itself is often limited by the vagueness of its common-law background.
