Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

The editorial addresses the functions and purposes of the preliminary investigation and the various associated acts, provisional or definitive. It covers the influence of preliminary investigation over criminal prosecution and the exercise of defense in police inquiries as well as through investigations by the defense. The editorial dialogues with the authors of the dossier, introducing the texts.

The Reid Technique is a method of interviewing and interrogation widely diffused and used in criminal investigations. Manipulation, persuasion, coercion and psychological pressure are just some of the instruments used in favor of confession, regardless of the veracity. This paper tries to clarify the following questions: What is the main inheritance from the inquisitorial criminal procedural system and how does it relate to the police interrogation in Brazil? What are the main reasons that can explain the occurrence of the false confession? What does the Reid Technique consist of? What are the possible alternative to this technique? 

This article intends to analyze the recent legislative changes that have occurred in Brazil, especially the establishment of consensual forms of dispute resolution and their impacts in the fight against corruption and economic macro-criminality. Using the idea of technical prevention as proposed by Winfried Hassemer as a theoretical framework, it is intended to assess whether negotiated criminal justice represents an effective alternative to the dominant punitivist paradigm, with greater ability to reduce impunity and increase crime prevention indexes related to offenses against Public Administration and the economic order. Initially, some criminological aspects of corruption and macroeconomic criminality will be addressed, as well as political-criminal factors, which place the ideal of prevention as the central vector of the contemporary criminal justice system. Then, the insufficiency of the traditional model of Brazilian criminal prosecution, based on litigation, and its inefficiency in dealing with cases related to economic macro-crime and corruption will be analyzed. Finally, the main aspects related to the implementation of new consensual forms of dispute resolution in the criminal field, the political-criminal prognoses in the treatment of corruption and organized crime and their impacts on the performance of prosecution and judicial branch.

Criminal confession is a powerful and highly incriminating piece of evidence. An authentic inculpatory confession can be a fertile source of new evidence known only to the actual perpetrator. It helps the prosecution to build a stronger case against the defendant in a situation where only circumstantial evidence is available. In some cases, such as no-body homicides and wild-land arson fires, it is difficult to prove the defendant's participation and guilt without his willing and full cooperation. All of this explains why in the era of advanced forensic techniques criminal investigators are keen to obtain confessions using a variety of tactics. Studies show, however, that some interrogation techniques are more likely to induce false confessions, which, in turn, increase the likelihood of judicial errors. From a human rights perspective, the European Court of Human Rights has expressed serious concerns about the use of evidence obtained through violence, coercion or torture but has been unable to establish the balance between efficient law enforcement and adequate protection of individual rights. In the article, legal provisions against improper police compulsion in Poland and Russia were analyzed. It appears that each country applies a different approach to the issue of police coercion. In Russia, the law provides specific rules on the admissibility of criminal confessions, their evidentiary value, and methods of verifying the reliability of suspect’s testimony. In Poland, the law confers a wider discretion on the domestic courts as to how to deal with confession evidence and the allegations concerning the use of coercive interrogation techniques. Based on the results of the analysis of pertinent legal provisions, case-law and legal doctrine, the authors aimed to determine the effectiveness of two models in preventing and dealing with coerced criminal confessions. Several changes were suggested to address the issue of excessive judicial formalism concerning the allegations regarding the use of unlawful interrogation techniques.             

Detecting a kind of procedural paternalism in the performance of judges, it is sought to demonstrate that the double judicial analysis of the awarded cooperation agreement, as provided for by Law 12.850/2013, is a point of destabilization of the Brazilian negotiated criminal justice system, contributing negatively to a series of procedural inconsistencies, notably for transgressing the constitutional principles of impartiality and the natural judge, being the genesis of procedural nullity. In this context, it is intended to answer the following problem: would the simplification of the procedure, involving the drafting of the awarded cooperation agreement, with the extinction of the double judicial analysis of the referenced agreement, contribute to enhancing the fight against corruption without affecting the fundamental guarantees of the accused? In response to the problem, we use the analysis of case law and legal theory on the subject, including a comparative study between similar foreign legal institutes.   

This editorial aims to analyze relevant topics related to confiscation and patrimonial restrictions to constrain assets that potentially have illicit origin. That may be implemented in the criminal process itself or in civil claims, like the Mexican “extinción de dominio”. In both perspectives, there are many possible issues about legitimacy of those mechanisms, like in terms of protection of individual guarantees and rights, that are examined in the articles published in this dossier.

The declaration of the victim of the crime has been gaining prominence in the Spanish criminal process, to the point of becoming essential to enervate the presumption of innocence in those processes in which it is the only proof of charge. This circumstance has become even more relevant, even if possible, in crimes related to gender violence, characterized, on the one hand, by the special characteristics that converge on someone who, in addition to being a victim of the criminal act, is a witness to it and, on the other, due to the scarce body of evidence that the judge usually has in the criminal proceedings followed by such acts, as these are behaviours generally committed in the intimacy of the couple's relationship. The purpose of this work is to analyse the guiding parameters provided by the Spanish Supreme Court in the declaration of such victims. The traditional jurisprudential position will be examined and the expansion that these criteria have made in the recent ruling of the Supreme Court 119/2009, of March 6, will be critically assessed afterward, to determine the need or not for such expansion, as well as the incidence of its application in the processes followed by crimes related to gender violence.

This paper proposes a scientific criticism of “Redefining claim preclusion from verdict sovereignty", in which the immediate execution of the sentence to those convicted by the jury trials is defended. From the delimitation of the concept of democracy in the criminal procedure, this paper addresses the problems of the ideological inversion of discourse around the procedural guarantees that, in the hypothesis of the article, led to the argumentative use of the sovereignty of verdicts for the purpose of expanding the criminal power. In addition, this paper operates the concept of normative culpability of the presumption of innocence, a key category for understanding the resources and the impossibility of execution of the sentence immediately or anticipated, before the claim preclusion of guilty criminal sentence. 

Approaching criminality in an interdisciplinary context has concerned practitioners in the last decades. The same situation is observed in criminal cases having as object the criminal investigation of corruption crimes, knowing the fact that this phenomenon is still into the judicial authorities' attention. In practice, there is a substantial jurisprudence on this topic. The current paper focuses on criminal investigation of the corruption in an interdisciplinary context, including elements of forensic investigation, gathering evidence by means of forensic science, as well as their administration during the criminal proceedings. Moreover, researching the current topic aims at analyzing phenomenon from the perspective of the judicial bodies' efforts of assuring functions of discovering and preventing corruption crimes, as well as punishing defendants during the criminal proceedings. In order to achieve this goal, the paper is designed in a qualitative research, with comparative elements and aspects of jurisprudence in criminal matters.   

The study aims to understand to what extent the maxiprocesses, of which Operation Car Wash is a paradigmatic reference, and the media contributed to the transformation of the criminal process in Brazil. From the dialect method and a transdisciplinary perspective that assumes the theoretical contributions of critical criminology, the work will be guided by the following question: how the articulation between Operation Car Wash and the journalistic narrative about corruption contributed to the resignification of the structuring elements of criminal proceedings? The investigation assumes as a hypothesis that the symbolic construction of reality by the media and the rise of Operation Car Wash promoted the mutation of the sources of legitimization of the Brazilian criminal process, crystallizing the belief that efficient control of crime requires the expansion of punitive power and the introduction of new procedural methods that restrict fundamental rights, as is the case with a leniency deal and other institutes linked to bargained justice.