Reforming Complicity Law: Trivial Assistance as a Lesser Offense?

American accomplice law is a disgrace. It treats the accomplice in terms of guilt and, potentially, punishment, as if she were the perpetrator, even when her culpability is often less than that of the perpetrator and/or her involvement in the crime is tangential. The subject of accomplice liability has received relatively little scholarly attention in the United States except for a flurry of intellectual activity in the mid-1980s. One of these articles proposed reform of complicity law in the form of what may be characterized as the “causation approach.” The thesis of that article was that the criminal law fails to adequately distinguish between accomplices who are critical parties in a crime and those whose involvement is trivial. To alleviate this problem, the article recommended a statutory distinction between “causal” and “non-causal” accomplices: causal accomplices could continue to be convicted of the offense committed by the principal; noncausal accomplices would be convicted of a lesser offense and punished accordingly.