A codefendant is any person or company named on the defending side of the same case as at least one other defendant. The codefendant meaning is the same in civil and criminal court: you share a case caption with others because a plaintiff or prosecutor decided your conduct was close enough to theirs to handle in one proceeding. Sharing a case number is where the similarity ends. Each codefendant’s role, fault, and exposure get judged on their own, and the relationships among the defendants often matter as much as their fight with the other side.
How Someone Ends Up as a Codefendant
In a civil case, a plaintiff creates codefendants by naming more than one party in the complaint. Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 20 allows this when the claims against the defendants arise from the same transaction or series of events and share at least one common question of law or fact.1Legal Information Institute. Federal Rules of Civil Procedure Rule 20 – Permissive Joinder of Parties A three-car collision is the textbook example: all three drivers can be named in one negligence suit.
In a criminal case, codefendants are created by an indictment or charging document. Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 8(b) lets prosecutors charge defendants together when they are alleged to have participated in the same act or a related series of offenses. A drug distribution ring, a multi-person fraud scheme, or a two-person robbery all tend to produce codefendant charges. Being named does not mean the court views everyone as equally culpable. Each person’s role gets weighed separately.
Codefendant vs. Co-conspirator
These terms get mixed up, but they are not interchangeable. A codefendant is anyone named on the same side of the same case. A co-conspirator is someone specifically accused of agreeing with others to commit a crime. Two drivers sued after a wreck are codefendants but not co-conspirators. Two people charged with planning a bank robbery are both. Conspiracy carries its own elements and its own penalties on top of the underlying crime.
What Being a Codefendant Means in a Civil Case
The biggest practical issue for a civil codefendant is how damages get divided. In jurisdictions that follow joint and several liability, each codefendant who contributed to the plaintiff’s injury can be held responsible for the full amount of the judgment, not just the slice matching their own share of fault. If a jury awards $100,000 and one codefendant was 10% at fault while another was 90% at fault, the plaintiff can collect the whole $100,000 from whichever defendant has the money. Plaintiffs tend to go after the deepest pocket.
Not every state still works that way. Many have moved to proportionate liability, where each defendant pays only their percentage share. Some use a hybrid, applying joint and several liability only when a defendant’s share of fault passes a set threshold. The rule in your jurisdiction matters a great deal, and this is one of the areas where guessing wrong is expensive.
Clawing Money Back From the Other Side of the Table
A codefendant who ends up paying more than their fair share has two possible routes to recover from the others. Contribution lets them get back a proportionate share from other defendants who were also at fault, provided an actual joint liability existed and not just the possibility of one. Indemnity is different: it seeks full reimbursement rather than a share, and usually depends on a contract or on a situation where one party’s liability is purely derivative of another’s.
One trap worth knowing: a codefendant who voluntarily pays more than their equitable share in a settlement can be treated as a volunteer and lose the right to seek contribution for the excess. That is one reason settlement talks among codefendants get tense. Everyone is trying to resolve the case without picking up someone else’s tab.
What Being a Codefendant Means in a Criminal Case
The defining pressure in a multi-defendant criminal case is cooperation. Prosecutors routinely offer reduced charges or a lighter sentencing recommendation to one codefendant in exchange for testimony against the others. The first person to cooperate usually gets the best deal, which gives every codefendant a built-in incentive to turn on the others.
Defense lawyers sometimes describe this as a prisoner’s dilemma. The group would collectively be better off if nobody cooperated, but each person individually gains by being first to flip. A codefendant weighing cooperation has to balance a potentially shorter sentence against being seen as unreliable by a jury and against the personal fallout of testifying. In multi-defendant cases, a lot of defense work goes into reading whether the other codefendants are likely to cooperate.
Can Codefendants Share a Lawyer?
Hiring one lawyer for all the codefendants, usually to cut costs, is tempting but risky. Joint representation is not automatically unconstitutional. It violates the Sixth Amendment right to effective assistance of counsel whenever it produces an actual conflict of interest.2Constitution Annotated. Deprivation of Effective Assistance of Counsel in Joint Representation
Those conflicts are easy to spot in criminal cases. If one codefendant is weighing a plea deal that involves testifying against another, a single lawyer cannot competently advise both. The same problem shows up when the best defense for one codefendant is to blame the other. A trial court generally does not have to investigate the arrangement on its own unless something puts a potential conflict on its radar. If any defendant objects to joint representation, the court must take a close look, and where a real conflict exists, the court can refuse to accept a waiver and require separate counsel.2Constitution Annotated. Deprivation of Effective Assistance of Counsel in Joint Representation
A defendant who stays silent at trial has a steeper climb on appeal. They have to show an actual conflict existed and that it affected the lawyer’s performance. The one break is that once that showing is made, the defendant does not also have to prove the outcome would have been different.
When Codefendants Get Separate Trials
Codefendants are usually tried together, but a judge can order severance when a joint trial would be unfair. Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 14 allows separate trials when the joinder appears to prejudice any defendant or the government.3Legal Information Institute. Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure Rule 14 – Relief from Prejudicial Joinder The Supreme Court has said mutually antagonistic defenses do not automatically require severance, but trial judges keep the discretion to grant it when fairness demands.4Legal Information Institute. Zafiro v. United States, 506 US 534 (1993) Civil courts use the same basic logic, severing when the evidence against one defendant is so much more inflammatory that a jury could not realistically evaluate each one independently.
The Bruton Problem
The most common severance trigger in criminal cases is a codefendant’s confession. Under Bruton v. United States, admitting a non-testifying codefendant’s out-of-court confession that names another defendant violates the Confrontation Clause of the Sixth Amendment.5Justia U.S. Supreme Court Center. Bruton v. United States, 391 US 123 (1968) If one codefendant confessed and named the other, then refuses to take the stand, the person implicated has no one to cross-examine. The Supreme Court found that instructing the jury to disregard the confession was not a realistic fix. Prosecutors who hit a Bruton issue can redact the confession, seek separate trials, or persuade the confessing codefendant to testify so cross-examination becomes possible.
Getting Out: Challenging Improper Joinder
Being named as a codefendant does not lock you in. Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 21 lets a court drop a party who was improperly joined at any stage of the case. Misjoinder alone does not kill the lawsuit; the wrongly named party is removed and the case continues against the rest.6United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois. Rule 21 – Misjoinder and Non-joinder of Parties If you have no real connection to the underlying dispute, raise misjoinder early. Waiting means paying for discovery you never should have been pulled into.