Why are prosecutors pursuing JCE?
Ciorciari: “Joint Criminal Enterprise makes it easier to convict the defendants because it convicts them for their membership and participation on a team of people who were engaged in a common criminal plan and were taking different acts in furtherance of that plan. That said, the defense lawyers are going to have some powerful counter arguments that this Joint Criminal Enterprise theory was developed or, at least, advanced and expanded during the 1990s in the criminal tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. And that’s almost 20 years after the fall of the Pol Pot regime. One of the basic principles of criminal law is that we can’t convict people for crimes that didn’t exist at the time that they committed the acts in question. So, if I committed an act in 1975, the law that applies is the law that existed in 1975. And there is some debate in the legal community about whether Joint Criminal Enterprise was formed as a doctrine by the 1970s. And there’s a separate debate about exactly what t
