ABSTRACT
In some cases, it may be impossible to distinguish between principals and accomplices, for example, where two or more defendants stab the victim intending to murder him and it is the combined effect of the wounds which kills him. In these circumstances the defendants would be charged as joint principals. The test for distinguishing between a joint principal and an accomplice would seem to be to ask whether the defendant by his own actions, as distinct from anything done by the other parties to the crime, contributed to the causation of the actus reus? If the answer is ‘yes’, then the defendant is a joint principal rather than an accomplice.
