Criminal law codification

Monica Duarte Dantas, " O código do processo criminal e a reforma de 1841: dois modelos de organização do Estado (e suas instâncias de negociação) ". Conferência apresentada junto ao IV Congresso do Instituto Brasileiro de História do Direito – Autonomia do direito: configurações do jurídico entre a política e a sociedade, São Paulo, Faculdade de Direito/ USP, 2009 (versão para discussão).

The work aims to analyze the process of
codification of Brazilian procedural law in
light of a history of the legal dimensions of
justice in Brazil Empire. The goal is understand
the elements of autonomy of Law, present in
the national legal culture of the 19th century.
The set of sources to be addressed will be the
parliamentary acts that resulted in the Code of
Criminal Procedure of 1832, the handbooks
on the Code of Criminal Procedure, the laws
that reformed it and the special laws that
surrounded it. Still, a more accurate revision of
the political and social historiography already
produced will be made in order to verify points
of convergence with the perspective of the
History of Law and answer in an innovative
way the rise and fall of some legal institutions.
As results it was verified limits e possibilities in
the process of codification in the XIX century
Brazil and the position of Code of Criminal
Procedure of 1832, the cultural translation
of jury and habeas corpus to the Brazilian
imperial law and the role of lay judges in the
conformation of a “[criminal] citizen justice”.

The United Nations Development Programme and the Republic of the Maldives, a small Muslim country with a constitutional democracy, commissioned this project to craft the country's first system of codified penal law and sentencing guidelines. This article describes the special challenges and opportunities encountered while drafting a penal code based on shari'a (Islamic law). Such comprehensive codification is likely to bring more dramatic improvements in the quality of justice there than in many other societies, owing in large part to the problems of assuring fair notice and fair adjudication in the uncodified shari'a-based system in present use. Challenges faced by the project team included a particular need for clarity and simplicity presented by the relative lack of codification experience and training in the islands. However, this lack of experience and codification tradition also had unexpected advantages in that it gave drafters the freedom to invent new codification forms that would be difficult to adopt in a society with an entrenched codification history.

While it was a concern that any shari'a-based code could conflict with international norms, in practice it became apparent that the conflict was not as great as many would expect. Opportunities for accommodation were available, sometimes through interesting approaches by which the spirit of the shari'a rule could be maintained without violating international norms. In the end, this shari'a-based penal code drafting project yielded a Draft Code that can bring greater justice to Maldivians and also provide a useful starting point for modern penal code drafting in other Muslim countries.

Moreover, the code drafting project may have much to offer penal code reform in non-Muslim countries, for the structure and drafting forms invented here were used to solve problems that plague most penal codes, even codes of modern format such as those based upon the American Law Institute's Model Penal Code, which served as the model for most American penal codes. The challenges of accessible language and format, troublesome ambiguous acquittals, overlapping offences, combination offences, and penal code-integrated sentencing guidelines have all been addressed.

Im Laufe der 18-19. Jahrhunderten beschäftigten sich die Strafrechtsexperten sehr intensiv mit der Typologie der qualitativen Schuldarten und quantitativen Schuldgraden, diese Vorsatz- und Fahrlässigkeitstypen erschienen auch in der Gesetzgebung. Parallel entwickelten sich sechs verschiedene strafrechtswissenschaftlichen „Antworten“ auf die Präterintentionalität: dolus indirectus (z.B. Carpzov, öStGB 1803), culpa dolo determinata (z.B. Feuerbach, bairisches StGB 1813), Konkurrenz (z.B. Feuerbach, hessisches StGB 1841), Mittelstufe zwischen den Dolus und Culpa (z.B. Köstlin), objektive Verantwortlichkeit
(z.B. dStGB 1871, GA Nr. V von 1878) und Anerkennung der Schuldprinzip (z.B. erfolgsqualifizierte Delikte, § 18 Nr. G V von 1961). Der Vorschlag 1843 bedeutete eine Paradigmenveränderung: die Vorbilde der Regelung der Zurechnung waren die deutschen Kodifikationsprodukte und Strafrechtswissenschaft. Die Verfasser adaptierten Feuerbachs Konzeption mit wichtige Korrektionen (Abweisung der praesumptio doli). Im AT kam Vorsatz ohne Definition vor, im BT bei den Tatbeständen gegen das Leben waren der vorbedachte Vorsatz, der Vorsatz und der Straftat im Affekt. Neben der Definition der Fahrlässigkeit schrieb die Kommission nach hannoverschem Beispiel vor, nach welchen Kriterien der Richter gröbere oder geringere Fahrlässigkeit bestimmen soll. Für die Präterintentionalität existierte im AT Konkurrenz und im BT culpa dolo determinata, so war die Regelung inkonsequent.

This article argues that corrective justice is an adequate principle of criminal-ization. On my interpretation, corrective justice holds that, in order for an action to count as a crime, there needs to be a plausible normative story about an offender having violated the interests of a victim in a way that disturbs their relationship as equal persons and a subsequent story about responding to crime in a way that corrects this disturbance. More specifically, I claim that corrective justice is concerned with the protection of interests that persons have in owning private goods throughout standard interactions with other persons. The argument proceeds in three steps. First, I specify the subject-matter that principles of criminal law need to ground and provide an outline of the idea of corrective justice. Second, I show that corrective justice can account for the main cases of crime and the salient modes of criminal responsibility. I also argue that corrective justice can make sense of two prima facie recalcitrant types of cases (rape and inchoate offenses). Third, and finally, I address two objections to my corrective justice theory of criminal law. The first concerns the implications corrective justice has for locating criminal law along the private/ public law divide. The second objection raises the putatively problematic consequences corrective justice has for understanding the separation between criminal and civil law.