Is Parity of Culpability a Constraint on Accomplice Liability?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Not long ago in this journal, Joshua Dressler declared that "American accomplice law is a disgrace." 1 The main basis for this indictment is that complicity doctrine "treats the accomplice in terms of guilt and, potentially, punishment, as if she were the perpetrator, even when her culpability is often less than that of the perpetrator . . .." 2 In this contention of Dressler's, we see the influence of a powerful intuition that is often invoked in the complicity literature.The idea behind this parity of culpability principle is that there must be some sort of equivalence in the culpability of the principal and the accomplice in order for both to be convicted of the same crime and subject to the same range of possible sentences-as complicity doctrine requires.The federal complicity statute states that "[w]hoever . . .aids, abets, counsels, commands, induces or procures [the commission of an offense] is punishable as a principal." 3The parity of culpability principle (or just parity principle for short) would place a limitation on when accomplice liability-with the attendant punishment "as a principal"-is justly imposed.The principle entails that complicity law is unjust to the extent it permits convicting a defendant as an accomplice despite her 4 being less culpable than the relevant principal.My aim in this paper is to take a closer look at the parity principle-how it is to be understood, what if anything supports it, and whether it really places an independent constraint on the contours of accomplice liability.Is parity of culpability between the accomplice and the specific principal she aids really a necessary condition of its being fair to subject them both to the same criminal liability?That is what I aim to investigate here.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".