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Criminal Law • Preliminary Crimes
CRIMLAW#061
Legal Definition
Conspiracy is an agreement between two or more persons, with the intent to enter an agreement, where at least two persons intended to achieve the objective of the agreement, and an overt act in furtherance of the agreement was performed.
Plain English Explanation
Any time you have a fact pattern involving more than one person planning or discussing a crime they want to commit and they perform some action that demonstrates their intent to follow through with those plans, then a conspiracy has occurred.
Many students associate "conspiracy" with more complicated ideas of large government bodies operating some sort of secret shadow government that hides aliens or bigfoot, but conspiracies need not be that dramatic. A conspiracy can be as simple as two teenagers talking about how they plan on stealing beer from a liquor store, then hopping on their bikes and riding towards the liquor store. The purpose of "conspiracy" is to acknowledge that sometimes a crime is the aggregate result of multiple parties working together with a common goal of committing that crime. It wouldn't make sense to only punish those who are caught at the very end of a crime. In other words, one criminal is bad, but multiple criminals working together is worse.
For example, while sometimes a bank robbery involves a single, lone criminal, other times it involves a conspiracy with a group of people planning the crime, a driver waiting for their partner inside the bank to get the money, and even people who help with laundering the stolen money. However, practically speaking, only the person entering the bank really makes themselves available to being caught. It wouldn't be fair to only charge the criminal inside of the bank with the robbery when they likely wouldn't be there without the aid and assistance of their co-conspirators.
Many students associate "conspiracy" with more complicated ideas of large government bodies operating some sort of secret shadow government that hides aliens or bigfoot, but conspiracies need not be that dramatic. A conspiracy can be as simple as two teenagers talking about how they plan on stealing beer from a liquor store, then hopping on their bikes and riding towards the liquor store. The purpose of "conspiracy" is to acknowledge that sometimes a crime is the aggregate result of multiple parties working together with a common goal of committing that crime. It wouldn't make sense to only punish those who are caught at the very end of a crime. In other words, one criminal is bad, but multiple criminals working together is worse.
For example, while sometimes a bank robbery involves a single, lone criminal, other times it involves a conspiracy with a group of people planning the crime, a driver waiting for their partner inside the bank to get the money, and even people who help with laundering the stolen money. However, practically speaking, only the person entering the bank really makes themselves available to being caught. It wouldn't be fair to only charge the criminal inside of the bank with the robbery when they likely wouldn't be there without the aid and assistance of their co-conspirators.