Choose your friends wisely, or your co-conspirators anyway. So warned the U.S. Supreme Court, albeit implicitly, in Pinkerton v. United States.1 That case approved holding a conspiracy defendant liable for the reasonably foreseeable crimes of a co-conspirator committed in the furtherance of the conspiracy.2 In this Essay, I argue that Pinkerton liability should not be applied to juveniles.
2 See id. at 647-48 (affirming the defendant’s conspiracy conviction for the substantive offense of his co-conspirator, but stating it would have changed the outcome “if the substantive offense committed by one of the conspirators was not . . . done in furtherance of the conspiracy, did not fall within the scope of the unlawful project, or was merely a part of the ramifications of the plan which could not be reasonably foreseen as a necessary or natural consequence of the unlawful agreement”).