§705-522 Conspiracy with multiple criminal objectives.

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§705-522 Conspiracy with multiple criminal objectives. If a person conspires to commit a number of crimes, the person is guilty of only one conspiracy if the multiple crimes are the object of the same agreement or continuous conspiratorial relationship. [L 1972, c 9, pt of §1; gen ch 1993]

COMMENTARY ON §705-522

This section substantially adopts the language of §5.03(3) of the Model Penal Code. In conspiracy, the danger for which the sanction is imposed arises out of the special circumstances of the joining of several individuals to effect a criminal object. Here, the law quite correctly recognizes that there is a special and unique danger in individuals combining to commit crime: this danger is easily seen in the pervasive and pernicious aspects of so-called "organized crime" today.

Hence it may be seen that, in the area of conspiracy, the particular crimes which are the object of the conspiracy are of concern only in defining the criminality of the conspiratorial intent. Since it is the actual combination or agreement which we seek to condemn, each combination or agreement constitutes a single separate crime of conspiracy, regardless of how many separate offenses are intended under the agreement.

The traditional conspiracy question, of whether different objectives executed over a period of time are included in the same agreement, is largely avoided by the modifying clause at the end of the section. Rather than considering such questions of intent and causality, the Code focuses upon the more significant question of a continuous association for criminal purposes.[1]

In this area, the Code is in accord with the present prevailing doctrine of most jurisdictions. The development of the present doctrine may easily be traced in a series of Supreme Court decisions.

In United States v. Rabinowich,[2] the Court recognized that a conspiracy is not to be equated with the commission of the crime contemplated, and neither arises under nor violates the statute the violation of which is its object.[3] Subsequently, in Frohwerk v. United States,[4] the Supreme Court attempted to settle a question which had formerly been uncertain in the federal courts; i.e., whether a conspiracy was singular although its objectives were multiple. The Court held that "the conspiracy is the crime, and that is one, however diverse its objects."[5] The issue was resolved in Braverman v. United States,[6] wherein the Court explains,

Whether the object of a single agreement is to commit one or many crimes, it is in either case that agreement which constitutes the conspiracy which the statute punishes. The one agreement cannot be taken to be several agreements and hence several conspiracies because it envisages the violation of several statutes rather than one.[7]

It is this view which is adopted in both the Model Penal Code and the present Code.

Previous Hawaii law, in treating one joining after the formation of a conspiracy as if one had been part of it from the beginning,[8] would include in one's criminal object those crimes perpetrated before one joined. Hence, under past Hawaii law, if A and B conspired to rob V and sell the stolen goods at various remote locations, C, who joined after the robbery of V, would be held guilty of the conspiracy to rob V, as well as of the conspiracy to distribute the stolen goods.[9] The Code, in its unilateral approach to conspiratorial liability, holds a person liable for conspiracy only with respect to those acts and results which the person's agreement includes.

Hence in the above example, C is liable only of conspiracy to distribute stolen goods, and not of conspiracy to commit robbery. This result is obtained by the language requiring that the crimes be the object of the same agreement or relationship into which the conspirator has entered.

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§705-522 Commentary:

1. M.P.C., Tentative Draft No. 10, comments at 129-30 (1960).

2. 238 U.S. 78 (1915).

3. Id. at 87.

4. 249 U.S. 204 (1919).

5. Id. at 210.

6. 317 U.S. 49 (1942).

7. Id. at 53-54; for a complete discussion of this line of cases, see M.P.C., Tentative Draft No. 10, comments at 127-128 (1960).

8. H.R.S. §728-2.

9. See Territory of Hawaii v. Kitabayashi, 41 Haw. 428 (1956).