ART AND PART, Scotch law. Where one is accessory to a crime committed by
another; a person may be guilty, art and part, either by giving advice or
counsel to commit the crime; or, 2, by giving warrant or mandate to commit
it; or, 3, by actually assisting the criminal in the execution.
2. In the more atrocious crimes, it seems agreed, that the adviser is
equally punishable with the criminal and that in the slighter offences, the
circumstances arising from the adviser's lesser age, the jocular or careless
manner of giving the advice, &c., may be received as pleas for softening the
punishment.
3. One who gives a mandate to commit a crime, as he is the first spring
of the action, seems more guilty than the person employed as the instrument
in executing it.
4. Assistance may be given to the committer of a crime, not only in the
actual execution, but previous to it, by furnishing him, with a criminal
intent, with poison, arms, or other means of perpetrating it. That sort of
assistance which is not given till after the criminal act, and which is
commonly called abetting, though it be itself criminal, does not infer art
and part of the principal crime. Ersk. Pr. L; Scot. 4, 4, 4 ; Mack. Cr.
Treat. tit. Art and Part.