ABSTRACT
The idea is attractive constructive or vicarious liability operates only for the head of a criminal syndicate and not apparently otherwise. If group crimes are, as a matter of policy, considered to be very dangerous, the criminal law should reflect that in increased penalties for group crimes and perhaps especially those with a propensity to develop into violence. Joint criminal enterprise (JCE) or no, the person who commits murder is liable for murder. The confederates in the robbery are to be judged individually. If the reported decisions of the Singapore courts are anything to go by, no one seemed to have been aware of the possibility of constructive liability for JCEs until about half a century after the advent of the Penal Code in Singapore. Macaulay did not favour a mandatory death penalty for murder, and the Indian Penal Code (IPC) preserves the option between death and life imprisonment.
