Common purpose

The doctrine of common purpose, common design, joint enterprise, or joint criminal enterprise is a common law legal doctrine that imputes criminal liability to the participants in a criminal enterprise for all that results from that enterprise. A common application of the rule is to impute criminal liability for wounding a person to participants in a riot who knew, or were reckless as to knowing, that one of their number had a knife and might use it, despite the fact that the other participants did not have knives themselves. In England and Wales and certain other Commonwealth countries, this was the understanding of the courts until February 2016, when the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom and the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council jointly ruled that it was wrong, and that nothing less than intent to assist the crime would do.