Complicity and its Significance for Criminal Responsibility

The grown organized crime in Lithuania obliges the courts to analyze complicity cases especially closely, delimit forms of complicity. It is acknowledged that the acts committed by several persons are more difficult to qualify and exact understanding of features is necessary for that. A very important criminal law position is the fact that contrary to the period up to 2003 the accomplice is regulated in a separate article of CC General Part and not only in the articles regulating the imposing of punishment. The CC in effect at present much more in detail regulates the sorts and forms of accomplices and ensures proper and exact application of criminal law. So it is very important to know the features of complicity and combine them in both practical and theoretical cognition aspects. In the Master‘s theses the author familiarizes with the concept of complicity, objective and subjective features, the definition of complicity sorts and forms in the crime has been presented, as taking into consideration the character, form of the sort of accomplices the size of the punishment differs, as the character of actions of every accomplice determines the dangerousness of the person who has committed them. Following the statistical data and scientific literature of Lithuanian and foreign authors, also Lithuanian legal acts, principal aspects and limits of accomplices criminal responsibility have been analyzed, as correct understanding of one of the aspects of criminal responsibility is one of the conditions ensuring the legitimacy in criminal cases. The analysis is based on the cassation practice of Lithuanian Supreme Court. In the paper the principal peculiarities of the complicity concept existing in foreign criminal law have been also presented