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.