A single criminal conspiracy may have for its object the violation of two or more criminal laws or two or more substantive offenses, but the conspiracy is still one offense, if a single agreement exists, no matter how many repeated violations of the law may have been the object of the conspiracy. Whether an information properly charges multiple conspiracies or a single ongoing conspiracy depends upon analysis of the proof adduced at trial.
An agreement is the primary element of a conspiracy, and the agreement may go on for a long period of time and include the performance of numerous transactions and have multiple objectives.
Burden of ProofA criminal conspiracy continues to exist until consummated, abandoned, or otherwise terminated by some affirmative act. The State has the burden to prove the conspiracy has been consummated, abandoned, or otherwise terminated.
Below our Trial Attorney William R. Moore illustrates a criminal case on the Conspiracy of Drug Trafficking
Fort Lauderdale Criminal Lawyer IllustrationThe defendant and several other persons agreed to purchase and sell large quantities of cocaine. The evidence showed there was one overall conspiracy to traffic by co-conspirators making a series of trips to Fort Lauderdale, and the cocaine was thereafter distributed in Florida and Georgia.
The State failed to demonstrate that the original conspiracy was consummated, abandoned, or terminated by some affirmative act, and the defendant could only be convicted of one conspiracy charge.
A defendant may not be put in double jeopardy by trial for the same conspiracy to commit a different criminal act, such as where the State fails to demonstrate that the original conspiracy was consummated, abandoned, or otherwise terminated by some affirmative act.
Where the trial evidence does not support convictions for two counts of conspiracy to commit murder when there is a single express agreement between the defendant and an accomplice to commit the murder of one individual, the fact that another individual happens to be at the scene and is also killed does not alone render the agreement a double conspiracy.
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