For other uses, see Accomplice (disambiguation).



At law, an accomplice has lesser guilt than the person he or she is assisting, is subject to lesser prosecution for the same crime, and faces the smaller criminal penalties. As such, the three accomplices to the bank robbery above can also to a degree be found guilty of armed robbery even if only one stole money.

The fairness of the doctrine that the accomplice is still guilty has been subject to much discussion, particularly in cases of capital crimes. Accomplices have been prosecuted for felony murder even if the actual person who committed the murder died at the crime scene or otherwise did not face capital punishment.

In jurisdictions based on the common law, the concept of an accomplice has often been heavily modified by statute, or replaced by new concepts entirely.


Criminal law in Canada is governed by the Criminal Code, a federal statute. Parliament has abolished the concepts of accomplice and accessory, and instead created a single statutory concept, namely being party to an offence:

21. (1) Everyone is a party to an offence who
(a) actually commits it;
(c) abets any person in committing it.

A person can become a party to an offence where they encourage another (the principal) with words or acts, and intend to encourage.[2]

Mere presence at the scene of an offence is not sufficient grounds for liability. More involvement is needed, such as:

However, presence at the commission of the offence is evidence of aiding or abetting if accompanied by other factors.[3]

United Kingdom

One of the most notorious cases of this type was the 1952 case in England involving Derek Bentley, a mentally challenged man who was in police custody when his sixteen-year-old companion, Christopher Craig, shot and killed a police constable during a botched break-in.[4] Craig was sentenced to be detained at Her Majesty's Pleasure, since as a juvenile offender he could not be sentenced to death (he was released after serving ten years), but Bentley was hanged despite popular protest. The incident was dramatized in the film Let Him Have It, which is what Bentley allegedly said to Craig during the incident, which can be interpreted either as telling Craig to shoot the policeman, or to give him the gun. The hanging of Bentley led to public outrage and sparked the MP Sydney Silverman's campaign to abolish capital punishment in the United Kingdom, achieved c. 1965.

United States




An accomplice was often referred to as an abettor. This term is not in active use in the United States, having been replaced by accomplice.

See also


  1. Criminal Code, RSC 1985, c C-46, s 21. Archived September 29, 2015, at the Wayback Machine.
  2. R v Greyeyes [1997] 2 SCR 825.
  3. Dunlop v R [1979] 2 SCR 881.
  4. "BBC News - UK - Let him have justice, say campaigners". Retrieved 15 July 2015.
  5. Guam v. Dela Rosa, 644 F.2d 1257, 1260-61 (9th Cir. 1981) (per curiam) defining an accomplice as “one who could have been indicted for the same offense either as an accessory or principal”
Look up accomplice in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.