Parties to Crime in UK Law

The rationale of the confiscation regime is that the defendant is deprived of what he has gained or its equivalent. He cannot, and should not, be deprived of what he has never obtained or its equivalent, because that is a fine. This must ordinarily mean that he has obtained property so as to own it, whether alone or jointly, which will ordinarily connote a power of disposition or control, as where a person directs a payment or conveyance of property to someone else.

contemplates that the defendant in question should have been instrumental in getting the property out of the crime. Not necessarily the only cause: there may, plainly, be other actors playing their parts. All that is required is that the defendant's acts should have contributed, to a non-trivial (that is, not de minimis) extent, to the getting of the property. This is no more than an instance of the common law's conventional approach to questions of causation.

While we in no way wish to detract from the obligation upon a Judge to advise a jury to proceed with caution where there is material to suggest that a witness's evidence may be tainted by an improper motive, and the strength of that advice must vary according to the facts of the case, we cannot accept that there is any obligation to give the accomplice warning with all that entails, when it is common ground that there is no basis for suggesting that the witness is a participant or in any way involved in the crime the subject matter of the trial.

But the tort of conspiracy is constituted only if the agreed combination is carried into effect in a greater or less degree and damage to the Plaintiff is thereby produced. It must be so, for, regarded as a civil wrong, conspiracy is one of those wrongs (like fraud or negligence) which sounds in damage, and a mere agreement to injure, if it was never acted upon at all and never led to any result affecting the party complaining, could not produce damage to him.

But there are other cases within this field in which there is evidence on which a reasonable jury could find that a witness was a "participant". In such a case the issue of " accomplice vel non" is for the jury's decision: and a Judge should direct them that if they consider on the evidence, that the witness was an accomplice, it is dangerous for them to act on his evidence unless corroborated: though it is competent for them to do so if, after that warning, they still think fit to do so.