Art And Part

Art and part is a term used in Scots law to denote the aiding or abetting in the perpetration of a crime,— or being an accessory before or at the perpetration of the crime. There is no such offence recognized in Scotland as that of being an accessory after the fact.Under section 293 of the Criminal Procedure (Scotland) Act 1995, a person may be convicted of, and punished for, a contravention of any enactment, notwithstanding that he was guilty of such contravention as art and part only.
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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.

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, etc., may be received as pleas for softening the punishment.

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.

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.
   

This entry contains material from Bouvier's Legal Dictionary, a work published in the 1850's.