Understanding the Criminal Legal System and its Principles
Unit I: The Criminal Legal System
Definition: A set of rules that describe behaviors rejected by society and contain the threat of a penalty. The State is the one that prohibits conduct, applies sanctions, and regulates social life.
Characteristics of Criminal Law
The main features of criminal law are that it is public, regulatory, evaluative, a finalist, and deals with external events.
- Public: Because the state is able to create rules defining crimes and imposing sanctions.
- Regulatory: Because it lays down rules on what should be. No one shall be convicted without being heard or summoned.
- Evaluative: Because it protects the highest values of society. For example, fraud should be punished.
- Finalist: It deals with behaviors to maintain social order.
- Regulator of External Events (Soler): Ulpiano Congitations poenam patitur nemo. The desire to have a subject at a time prior to the event is inconsequential, or no one can be criminally punished for his thoughts, as expressed by Ulpiano: “You cannot punish anyone’s thought.”
Characters of Criminal Law
- Criminal Law is located within the field of public law because it safeguards general interests, such as the Right to Life, the Right to Freedom, and the Right to Property. These protected assets are of interest to the whole community, and the criminal sanction is in the hands of the Organs of State, which necessarily have to apply it when given the assumptions.
- The protection of interests is criminal law, and when they are affected, the State steps in and decides the conflict. In some cases, the state’s punitive jurisdiction may depend on the exercise of the will of individuals.
Classification of Criminal Law
There is a preliminary classification:
- Subjective Criminal Law: The power to threaten legal status to the community.
- Objective Criminal Law: Legal rules issued by the public authority that establish crimes, punishments, and security measures.
- Substantive Criminal Law: Known as the criminal background, these are the rules promulgated by the state establishing rules and penalties on the offense, the offender, and the sentence or security measure.
- Criminal Law and Criminal Procedure (Adjective): This is the set of legal rules designed to establish the mode of application of criminal laws. Rules dealing with the substantive law to apply.
Criminal Law and Social Control
Criminal law is a means of social control; that is, it plays an important role in order to protect social peace and the social conditions necessary for human beings to live in harmony in society. However, it is not the only means of social control that exists. There are other ways that should even precede criminal law, which, due to the seriousness of its consequences, is the ultima ratio of the system. The forms of extra-legal social control that precede it are family, school, and religion. There are also legal control methods, which are the other areas of law, such as civil, administrative, and commercial.
Role of Criminal Law
Criminal law, as an instrument of control, serves several functions, among which, according to Maria Silva Sanchez, are: the role of ethics – social, symbolic function, and psychological function – social.
- Social Ethical Role: Criminal law plays a formative role in the behavior patterns of society because, even though penal law and morality are different things, it contains a compound of the ethical minimum of what a community considers fundamental and universal values.
- Symbolic Function: Also called the rhetorical function, it promotes the production in public opinion of the reassuring impression of an attentive and determined legislator. Cesare Beccaria said: “One of the biggest brakes on crime is not the cruelty of the punishment but its infallibility.” The general preventive efficacy of the criminal sanction is framed specifically in its certainty, its infallibility, and its readiness.
- Civil Psycho-Social: This function refers to the role of “satisfactor” of the social motivations to be met by criminal law. It is a channeler of collective resentment when wronged society demands punishment.
Science of Criminal Law and Criminal Legal Doctrine
Criminal Law as Science is the systematic set of principles on crime, punishment, and security measures. It is designed to systematize what the rules are that define acts of the social order and appropriate measures for its prevention and repression.
In liberal legal systems like our own, crimes and penalties are established; therefore, for the criminal law, it is a true dogma, a truth that must be regarded as firm and true.
The criminal legal dogmatic discipline is designed to discover, build, and organize the guiding principles of criminal law. The criminal legal dogmatic and criminal science complement the comprehensive study of positive criminal law. The property dogmatic science of criminal law is the way to analyze the study of criminal law as the study of legal rules. Criminal dogmas are nullum crimen sine lege nulla Paene (no offense if it is not stated in the law) and no one can be tried twice for the same offense.
Criminal Schools
- Classical Schools: The first representative of this school is Francisco Carmignani. His work, Elements of Criminal Law, proposes a system of criminal law derived from reason, being one of the first to draw a scientific system of criminal law in the Germanic tongue. The school is distinguished by the fact that the elements of criminal law are crimes and punishment.
- Positivist School: The creator of the positive school was Cesare Lombroso. For the Positivist school, in addition to the crime and punishment, there is another element: the protagonist, i.e., the person who commits the crime. The offender is the person who is going to be charged with the crime.
Venezuelan Criminal Law
Venezuelan criminal law is contained primarily in the Criminal Code of 1926, partially refurbished in 1964, in 2000, with the last renovation in 2005.
Division of the Venezuelan Criminal Code
The Venezuelan Penal Code is divided into three (3) books, namely:
- Book One: General Provisions. It is about Crimes and Misdemeanors (as prescribed sentences, the time lags), various ways in which the crime was committed, and penalties.
- Second Book: Discusses various species of crime and the punishment assigned to each.
- Third Book: It’s about fouls in general.