First, the prosecution of the Lincoln conspirators, though nominally based on conspiracy, was not based on conspiracy as an
inchoate offense. (78) The whole point of the Lincoln assassination is that the conspirators completed the target crime--the crime to which the conspiracy was directed.
Casebook authors often have a difficult decision to make about where to locate the materials on the conspiracy doctrine because conspiracy does double duty as an
inchoate offense and as a mode of liability.
Instead, she should be prosecuted for an
inchoate offenseThe generally accepted common law definition of a criminal conspiracy is "an agreement between two or more persons to commit an unlawful act or to commit a lawful act by unlawful means." (18) As an
inchoate offense, conspiracy permits the government to indict groups of confederates who have not yet committed any crime apart from merely agreeing to break the law at some future time.
If the choice to intend to do something criminal is the core of any
inchoate offense, then one might ask: Why criminalize only statements at a stage earlier than Dressler's fifth stage of commencing the commission of the crime?
If the act of intentionally and directly causing a result should not be criminalized, the state cannot be justified in enacting an
inchoate offense to prevent persons from merely creating a risk of that result.
offense, however, the proscribed conduct in an
inchoate offense is not
It can be stopped and punished as soon as it starts; as an
inchoate offense, it need not blossom into actual harm.
(45) Why should we be more tolerant of strict liability when the ultimate harm X is not explicitly mentioned as an element of the
inchoate offense? I am unable to think of a case in which our intuitions would favor the result reached by applying their principle rather than mine.
inchoate offense.(44) Under that approach, [D.sub.1] would have committed
of
inchoate offenses, a criminal act requires a finding of causation:
Ideas about risk of harm also significantly influence the law of
inchoate offenses. As I wrote many years ago: