Against accomplice liability

Accomplice liability makes people guilty of crimes they knowingly helped or encouraged others to commit, even if they did not commit the crime themselves. But this method of criminalizing aiders and abettors is fraught with problems. In this chapter, I argue that accomplice liability in the criminal law should be replaced with a system in which agents are criminalized 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 were made “through” the actions of another person. Not only would this avoid the issues associated with making the guilt of accomplices parasitic on the guilt of the principal, it would also fill gaps in the law concerning other cases to which accomplice liability does not apply