The jurists, Jesús Caldera Infante, Duarte Canaán, Francisco Manzano and Trajano Potentini, agreed on the failure of criminal law as an effective tool for the prosecution of organized crime, after advocating for a restorative justice model that yields better results and case statistics. prosecuted and money recovered.
The opinions of the lawyers were expressed within the framework of the celebration of a specialized panel on, The Objective Imputation and the Role of the Public Ministry in Criminal Persecution, sponsored by the school of leadership, civic and legal training of the Justice and Transparency Foundation (FJT), directed by the teacher Cándido De Jesús, with the assistance of a large group of lawyers and journalists, where they raised the challenges and pitfalls of the criminal justice system, in the face of combating and prosecuting crime.
For his part, Trajano Potentini, valued and urged the Public Prosecutor’s Office to direct and achieve strategic agreements with possible defendants, which allow it to expand punitive coverage, especially taking into account the experience and Modus Operandis of the North American justice system that always seeks to obtain elements solid evidence to build other cases and secure convictions.
In this sense, Potentini suggested that the Public Ministry join the negotiation processes currently being carried out by the United States of America, with persons accused of money laundering and drug trafficking, in order to be able to recover evidence and testimonies, which later they will facilitate other trials, of possible defendants, today sheltered with the cloak of impunity.
On his side, the Venezuelan jurist and academic, based in Colombia, Jesús Caldera Infante, stressed that it is a legal pedagogy activity on the limitation of criminal responsibility in the investigation carried out by the Public Ministry (Prosecutor’s Office), of that country when personal circumstances (act of the victim, for example) or the environment or scenario where the unlawful conduct unfolds, which must be analyzed beyond the mere causal relationship or the subjective element (fraud, guilt) have influenced the result of the punishable act. , etc.) of the author of the act, consequently advocating for a model of restorative justice that achieves the end of justice in the effective repair of the damage caused.
The long-standing litigator and academic, Pedro J. Duarte Canaán, criticized the enormous growth of the catalog of existing criminal offenses in the country, a kind of punitive hyper-inflation, all linked to the excessive and abusive use of preventive detention as a rule , moving away from the interim truth that must accompany all accused, which is called the presumption of Innocence, a cardinal principle of constitutional law, unobserved and repeatedly violated by our judicial authorities.
Canaán understands that it is time to establish, in accordance with the philosophy of the Criminal Procedure Code (CPP), unfortunately counter-reformed in 2015, an effective mechanism of restorative or compassionate justice, which improves the capacities and efficiency of the public ministry, even claimed as a scientific methodology of criminal prosecution, figures such as mediation, conciliation and even arbitration, among many other actions proposed by the CPP, for the alternative solution of conflicts, in order to achieve effective and real results.
In that same order Canaán favored that the public ministry seek, in the absence of a domain extinction law, the making of agreements to recover large sums of money and the acknowledgment of guilt, especially without submitting to last years and years of struggle in the courts, such as the Odebrecht and Tucano cases, among others, without definition until now, and permanent statistics that show the failure, of not recovering even 1% of what was presumably stolen.
Francisco Manzano, presented his paper, classifying the crimes of corruption, and how neoliberalism limited the role and capacity of the state, leaving it a mere supervision task, he also made special emphasis on the impact and economic component of criminal prosecution, graphing the failure of extreme criminal law, in the past and notorious case of Baninter, whose judgment and results, after decades, cost the country more than 76 billion pesos, which, until now, have only been barely able to pay interest , leaving the debt still intact, despite almost 20 years having elapsed.
Finally, Manzano agreed with a model of restorative justice, although he explained the abysmal inequality that exists in the criminal policy system at the budget level with billions and billions for prosecution, in addition to deploring the lack of criminal offenses in the public contracting law, without a doubt a stumbling block that makes it difficultthe work of the public ministry.
