Continuing, ongoing and mass offences

Chapters of the article

• Mass Crimes
• Continuous crime
• Continuation of a crime
• Summary

From a temporal perspective, we distinguish three specific groups of crimes: mass crimes, continuing crimes and continuation crimes.

Mass offences

There is no statutory definition of a mass offence. However, it includes specific types of crime where a large number of similar acts with a single intention are required. However, they do not have to be one and the same offence.

An example is the offence of illicit arming. The law provides that whoever accumulates, manufactures or procures for himself or another weapons or ammunition in significant quantities shall be punished by imprisonment for six months to five years.

Thus, there is a clear condition of stockpiling and manufacturing weapons or ammunition in substantial quantities. If you produce only one weapon, it will still be an offence of illicit arming, but the penalty will be lower (namely imprisonment for two years, prohibition of activity or confiscation of the item).

Examples of both types of rates are Mr. Novák and Mrs. Milá. Mr. Novak decided to make a gun at home without the appropriate permit. He wanted something for self-defence. Unlike Mr Novák, Mrs Milá made her first gun out of curiosity. But she became very fond of it and started making them in large numbers.

In this case, Mr. Novák will be punished with a lighter penalty, which includes imprisonment for up to two years, a ban on his activities or forfeiture of his property. Because, even though it is only one weapon, he still committed the crime of illegally arming himself. Ms. Mila will already face a harsher prison sentence of six months to five years because she manufactured and stockpiled weapons in significant quantities.

Continuing offence

Continuing offences do not have a statutory definition either. However, it is a group of offences consisting in the maintenance of an unlawful condition, not just its short-term creation (e.g. a lock-up in a school cloakroom for several seconds, made as a joke, would not be characterised as a restriction of personal liberty). It may therefore be a situation where the offender carries out a criminal act thereby creating an unlawful state, and the offender then maintains or may not even carry out the criminal act, but merely maintains the unlawful state which has arisen without his doing so.

The important aspect is therefore continuity, not individual partial acts. Where there is a continuing offence, it is viewed as a single offence.

An example would be the offence of restraint of liberty. According to the Criminal Code, this is committed by a person who obstructs another’s enjoyment of personal liberty without authorisation. The word obstruct is important here, as it expresses a continuing fact. Kidnapping is itself a criminal offence, but if the perpetrator continues to hold a person in captivity, it is a continuing offence because he maintains an unlawful state of restraint of personal liberty.

Continuation of the offence

The Criminal Code defines a continuation of a criminal offence as an act whose individual partial attacks, led by a single intention, fulfil, even if in aggregate, the constituent elements of the same criminal offence, are connected by the same or similar manner of execution and by a close connection in time and in the object of the attack.

In practice, therefore, this is a situation where a person commits individual acts or acts which could themselves be regarded as separate offences, but which are carried out as part of a single connected intentional act. The key elements of this concept are:

• Uniform intent: a person has a single purpose or objective which he or she wishes to achieve through repeated acts.
• Similar manner of execution: Each of the individual acts is committed in a similar manner, which may involve the same process, tools or techniques.
• Close temporal relationship: The individual acts are committed within a short period of time, making it clear that they are not separate events but a connected series of acts.
• Contiguity in the object of the attack: All individual acts are directed at a similar target, object or subject.

An example might be where a person commits a series of thefts from the same store, with a similar method of execution and close spacing between the acts. For example:

• Day 1: A person enters a shop and steals a mobile phone worth CZK 5 000.
• Day 2: The person visits the shop again and steals a tablet worth 7 000 crowns.
• Day 3: The person enters the shop again and steals a smartwatch worth CZK 3 000.

While each theft in isolation could be considered a separate offence (theft), here it could be argued that it is a continuing offence. In fact, the individual thefts are carried out with a common intention (to steal goods), in a similar manner of execution (entering the shop, collecting the goods) and are interconnected in time (the thefts take place in the same shop at short intervals).

If the individual thefts were viewed separately, they would always constitute an offence, since the individual goods do not reach the CZK 10 000 damage threshold. However, by looking at them collectively, it will be a criminal offence or a continuation of a criminal offence.

Summary

The different types of offences in terms of time have a significant impact on the legal qualification and criminal rates. Bulk off ences require multiple similar acts with a single intent where accumulation or production in significant quantities is important. Continuing offences involve the maintenance of an unlawful condition, whether the offender has caused or merely maintained that condition. A continuing offence involves a series of partial attacks with a single intention, carried out in a similar manner and within a short period of time, which allows the offences to be treated as a single cumulative offence.