Conspiracy

CONSPIRACY, in English law, an agreement between two or more persons to do an unlawful act, or to do a lawful act by unlawful means. It is not necessary that the unlawful act or the unlawful means should be criminal; they need be only wrongful, i.e., tortious. At common law conspiracy is an indictable mis demeanour, but by s. 4 of the Offences against the Person Act 1861 conspiracy to murder, whether the victim be a subject of the king or not, and whether he is within the king's dominions or not, is declared also a misdemeanour and is punishable by penal servitude not exceeding ten years. Conspiracy to commit treason is treason. It is also interesting to note that the legislature has interfered in the case of illegal agreements as to bidding at auc tions, and has made it an offence f or a dealer to abstain from bidding for a consideration (Auctions Bidding Agreements Act 1927).

Criminal conspiracy may be classified as follows:—(i) To cheat and defraud; (2) to injure by wrongful acts other than fraudulent acts; (3) to commit any offence punishable by law; (4) to do any act with intent to pervert the course of justice; (5) con spiracies or combinations in relation to trade and employments. A husband and a wife cannot commit the offence as they are in law one person, but they can conspire with a third person.

Individuals Acting in Concert.

The most important ques tion in the law of conspiracy, apart from the statute law affecting labourers, is how far things which may be lawfully done by indi viduals can become criminal when done by individuals acting in concert, and some light may be thrown on it by a short statement of the history of the law. In the early period of the law down to the i7th century, conspiracy was defined by the Ordinance of Conspirators of I3o5:—"Conspirators be they that do confedre or bind themselves by oath, covenant, or other alliance, that every of them shall aid the other falsely and maliciously to indite, or cause to indite, or falsely to move or maintain pleas, and also such as cause children within age to appeal men of felony, whereby they are imprisoned and sore grieved, and such as retain men in the country with liveries or fees to maintain their malicious enter prizes, and this extendeth as well to the takers as to the givers." The offence aimed at here is conspiracy to indict or to maintain suits falsely; and it was held that a conspiracy under the act was not complete, unless some suit had been maintained or some person had been falsely indicted and acquitted. A doctrine, however, grew up that the agreement was in itself criminal, although the con spiracy was not actually completed (Poulterer's case, 161i). This developed into the rule that any agreement to commit a crime might be prosecuted as a conspiracy.

A still further development of this doctrine is that a combination might be criminal, although the object apart from combination would not be criminal. A dictum of Lord Denman's is often quoted as supplying a definition of conspiracy. It is, he says, either a combination to procure an unlawful object, or to procure a lawful object by unlawful means; but the exact meaning to be given to the word "lawful" in this antithesis has nowhere been precisely stated. A thing may be unlawful in the sense that the law will not aid it, although it may not expressly punish it. The extreme limit of the doctrine is reached in the suggestion of Lord Mansfield, C.J., in i8o9 (2 Camp. 369) that a combination to hiss an actor at a theatre is a punishable conspiracy.

The application of the wide conception of conspiracy to trade disputes and to civil questions arising out of contracts for service is dealt with under the headings LABOUR LAW, STRIKES AND