Criminal Conspiracy

Criminal conspiracy is an agreement between two or more people to commit a crime at some future time; in most jurisdictions the agreement itself constitutes the offense, with no requirement that any step be taken to carry out the underlying crime, distinguishing conspiracy from an attempt, which requires an act bringing the offender close to completing the substantive offense. England and Wales originally treated conspiracy as an open-ended common law offense capable of criminalizing any sufficiently threatening agreement; the Criminal Law Act 1977 replaced most of this with a statutory offense while preserving two common law variants, conspiracy to defraud and conspiracy to corrupt public morals or outrage public decency. United States law similarly defines conspiracy as an agreement to commit a crime or to accomplish a lawful end through unlawful means, and in most federal and state jurisdictions requires at least one overt act by a conspirator in furtherance of the plan, though the Supreme Court has held that the federal drug conspiracy statute carries no such requirement. Conspiracy law relieves prosecutors of the need to prove which conspirator performed which specific act, and has been applied in international criminal law, including the Nuremberg trials' prosecution of a common plan among Nazi leadership.