The Concept of Complicity and Its Legal Significance
An accusation often concerns several persons at once, and the central category here becomes complicity: under the law, complicity in a crime means the deliberate joint participation of two or more persons in the commission of an intentional crime. This definition combines two necessary elements — the number of participants and intent: random, uncoordinated acts do not create complicity, and the joint commission of an unintentional crime is likewise not covered by this institute. In accomplice cases the defence's first task is precisely to establish these boundaries: who acted, in what role and with what intent, since from this follows both the fact of responsibility, its degree and the frame of the qualification — and an error at this first step contaminates the entire accusation.