Participation and co-perpatration in negligent offences

The assumption of the extensive concept of perpetrator in negligent offences poses the biggest obstacle to the development of the doctrine of participation in this field. This interpretation causes serious problems, especially where the victim or third parties intervene intentionally in the chain of causation. Consequently, it has helped strengthen positions that, in all offences, argue for a restrictive concept of perpetrator. In German criminal law, the very fact that even intentional assistance or inducement to suicide is not punishable becomes a highly challenging issue for the theory of extensive negligent perpetration, which classifies equivalent careless conduct as perpetration. A comparable problem may arise in Turkish law with respect to careless participatory contributions to a self-inflicted injury. Thus, at the most fundamental level, classifying negligent contributions to self-harm by free and self-determining individuals as perpetration through an expansive interpretation is met with strong objections. When a third party, rather than the victim, intentionally intervenes in the causal process, the question then arises whether the careless contribution directed at the deliberate act of someone who directly produces the result suffices for negligent perpetration. These two problem areas can be regarded as the starting points for analysing participation and the restrictive concept of perpetrator in negligent offences. The joint commission of a negligent act is also connected, to a certain extent, with how these issues are resolved. Within this framework, the situation of persons who, by a common decision, join in creating or failing to prevent a prohibited, typical danger through careless conduct is examined under the heading of joint perpetration. Traditionally, when it cannot be determined with certainty which of the individual negligent acts that formed the source of danger actually produced the result, or when the decision that led to the typical result was adopted by at least one vote more than the statutory minimum quorum, determining criminal liability via negligent joint perpetration offers an attractive solution. Beyond such scenarios, the relevant juridical figure also emerges as an extension of intentional wrongdoing. Article 87(4) of the Turkish Penal Code, which addresses offences aggravated by result, provides an example of negligent joint perpetration as an extension of collectively committed wrongdoing. In all the issues highlighted above, the notions of negligence and participation face objections stemming from a theory of perpetration that has developed on a monistic basis and largely rests on "control over the act." Therefore, to arrive at a sound approach to the matters addressed in this study, it is essential to examine both the dogmatics of negligence and the monistic theory of perpetration. In this examination, special attention should be given to obligation-offences and personally-commited offences, insofar as they demonstrate the inadequacy of a single, unitary criterion of perpetration.