From transient usefulness to public vindictiveness

“If some new Pasteur were to invent a miraculous vaccine against crime, it is certain that from that moment the police, prisons and chains would be relegated to museums, and Criminal law it would be reduced to a chapter legal history“. Carnelutti On the subject of the utility of punishmentYes, I would be inclined to coin as accurate that dark concept of Machiavelli, that the end justifies the means.

Therefore, the punishment would be assessed as something transitory on the road, which must be a narrow and arduous road towards achieving greater goals within oneself. How then to ask instrumentalists The criminal law, that they do not pretend to have become surgeons who extol the very efficacy of punishment, when they should devote themselves to something different? The principle of minimal application of the law is now institutionalized. Criminal lawthen justifying the discretion in dosing them, by those who are invited to be part of the process.

Public revenge it is defined as “satisfaction for crimes, which must be given for the sole reason of justice, for the example of the public”; but what happens when this need for public satisfaction falls into the hands of people who increase the punishment as the only justification that they do they exist and are they worth it? The very goals of the Criminal Code will be threatened, eventually, by emotional charge and the twisted pride of being the executors or executors of a punishment which in reality should be the path towards the vindication of a human being. Punishment, therefore, would not be seen as an end, but only as a means towards other ends that are much more impersonal than those that could be cultivated by those who carry the face of the lictor in their hands and who, in the absence of this clarity in their purposes, they will always end up using it in the wrong way.

We believe that it is possible to apply, in our society, alternative ways of punishment, as they are surely already established. Let’s consider that it is criminal process it must be aimed at the truly dosed application of punishment, as a remedy that can no longer be found anywhere in that vast repertoire Exactly, like the last figure apply in given circumstances to members of the company. Therefore, those who prosecute crimes would be concentrated first, i diligently, in the form of precision and correct application of the Criminal Code.

Sometimes a dead letter seems to us to be that beautiful guiding principle that is caught like a fly in the middle of the web of the word u Criminal law; I think it is The first article which tells us “This Code is based on respect human dignity”.

This would imply that, in function investigate, official it would be forced to first verify, in any case, the innocence of those being investigated, but not their guilt. After exhausting all the means that would point a person to an innocent being, if there is no doubt about the existence of guilt, then the official person would express the principle of impartiality, presumption of innocence, respect for human dignity and minimal application of the law. criminal legislation, in the absence of other mechanisms of social control. There is no other alternative since he activated criminal prosecution of the accused, always respecting, of course, judge’s judgmentwithout ever losing his objectivity.