Criminal Conspiracy in Historical Common Law

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Criminal Conspiracy in Historical Common Law The law of conspiracy is considerably more complex and uncertain than it need be because the statutory reform of the area largely contained in Part I of the criminal law Act 1977 was only partial. As a result, there are now two types of conspiracy – statutory conspiracies governed by the 1977 Act, and an important but limited range of common law conspiracies, which were expressly retained by the act, still governed by the old common law rules, (Tomlins & King, 1992). The most recent of the conspiracies is the conspiracy to defraud, conspiracy to corrupt public morals and the conspiracy to outrage public decency; statutory conspiracy entails any agreement to commit a crime According to Scheb & Scheb, (2011), the main aim for the reformation of this system was that it was to temporarily curb the pending review and reform the law relating to fraud, offensiveness and indecency as well as shaping the view of society as a whole. The law has now been reformed by the Fraud Act 2006 in which the government waits to see how the law operates so as to come up with relative changes or abolish common law conspiracy to defraud. The ministry of justice in June 2012 published a post legislative assessment of the fraud act 2006, Cmnd 8372 which was of the idea of the retention of conspiracy to fraud and so it may be a longtime before there is any change. Major problems were experienced in the early years after the Act over how the preserved common law conspiracy to defraud dovetailed with the new statutory conspiracy to commit a crime as frequently, an agreement to defraud will necessarily involve an agreement to commit a substantive offence entailing dishonesty such as theft or the new offence of fr... ... middle of paper ... ...ssouri or the larger United States. Such crimes are prosecutable by law and the culprits have slim chances of getting off the hook with minimal penalties; judges as well as the larger judicial system have to bring to book fairly the perpetrators of such acts in the region. Works Cited Dressler, J. (2010). Criminal law. Eagan, MN: Thomson/West. Great Britain. (1987). Criminal law: Conspiracy to defraud. London: H.M.S.O. Herring, J. (2007). Criminal law. Basingstoke [England: Palgrave Macmillan. Scheb, J. M., & Scheb, J. M. (2011). Criminal law and procedure. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Cengage Learning. Tomlins, C. L., & King, A. J. (1992). Labor law in America: Historical and critical essays. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Winfield, P. H. (2001). The history of conspiracy and abuse of legal procedure. Washington, D.C: BeardBooks.

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