Against Accomplice Liability

Every year, thousands of people are convicted of crimes they didn’t commit. Yet this is no miscarriage of justice: by the mechanism of accomplice liability, defendants can be convicted of crimes committed by others – even if they don’t satisfy the elements of the crime themselves – so long as they knowlingly assisted or encouraged the perpetrator. In this talk, I will argue that the mechanism of accomplice liability should be abandoned. Instead, defendants should be indicted on the basis of their individual contributions to causings of harm – the larger the contribution, the more severe the crime – regardless of whether those contributions acted via the actions of another person.