GRAMMATICAL ANALYSIS OF THE PENAL TYPE

Criminal law is one of the means of social control available to the State in its task of protecting
certain legal rights, through the threat or imposition of a penalty, with a view to preserving peace
and social harmony. The medium is manifested through a set of rules established by the State to
regulate the deviation of the individual by criminalizing crimes and contravenes. As well as,
criminal law as the last ratio limits the punitive power of the State, which means that, in imposing
criminal law, the judge must keep in mind the principles of necessity, dignity, proportionality,
humanity, legality and justice.
Criminal rules are hosted in very generic laws, designed for a general case. In order to apply them
to specific cases it is essential to interpret the legal texts that contain them, that is, to discover the
objective meaning of them and their scope. This has important dogmatic implications, in that by
making a correct analysis of each of the structural elements that make up the criminal type will
allow us to conceive of a better process of comparing the conduct with the criminal type and thus
establishing whether it meets the requirements of this or not, that is, whether the behaviour is
typical or atypical.
This document discusses some rules for the interpretation of criminal types from the analysis of
the guiding verbs that compose it, as a structural element of the type.
What is a criminal type?
In general, "type" is an expression that designates all sets of elements joined by a common
meaning. The criminal type is the set of elements that characterizes behaviour as contrary to the
rule, in the strict sense, the description of the conduct prohibited by a rule.
Performing a criminal offense means carrying out the conduct described in it as harmful. To ensure
compliance with the conduct described in the type, an adequacy of the conduct performed to the
elements required in the criminal type must be made, to ensure that conduct that is typical is being
faced.
In this sense, criminal theory refers to the structural elements of the type as a way to achieve this
adequacy correctly. These are the legal presuppositions that pre-exist on any criminal rule, and
when a human behaviour finds no fit for any or all elements of its structure, it is said to be atypical.
The following are structural elements of the type:

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 Active subject: only man is an active subject of the crime, because only he is provided with
capacity and will and can, through his action or omission, violate the criminal legal system.
 Passive subject: the taxable person in the perpetration of a crime is the one who suffers
directly the action, it is on the person who relapses all the material acts used in the realization
of the illicit, is the holder of the right damaged or put into danger.
 Object: it is the person or thing on whom the execution of the crime rests. Thus, they can be
passive subjects, inanimate things or animals themselves.
 Conduct: voluntary human behaviour, positive or negative, aimed at a purpose. It means that
only human beings can commit positive or negative behaviours, whether it is an activity or
inactivity respectively. This behaviour is voluntary because it is a free decision of the subject
and is aimed at a purpose, because it is intended to carry out the action or omission.
 Result: event that includes not only a positive or negative acting, but also the effects produced.
 Causal nexus: it is stated by saying what cause is the set of concurrent positive or negative
conditions in the production of a result; and being the equivalent conditions, that is, of equal
value within the causal process, each of them acquires the category of cause, since if a
condition is mentally suppressed, the result does not occur.
Analysing Verbs in Criminal Law
The verb or verbs as elements of the type are defined in the same way as in any other parts of
speech, so we need to understand what the verb is from a grammatical point of view.
In general terms, verb is defined as "word with which actions, processes, states or existence that
affect people or things are expressed".
The verb, as a governing factor in the basic criminal type, is the one that rules the grammatical
sentence called the type.
Criminal types can be classified according to the number of verbs they contain, and their relation
between them. If a criminal type has a single verb, it is called elementary criminal type and will
be a compound criminal type when it has more than one, it can be a disjunctive compound or a
copulative compound, as well as complementary verbs.
 Elemental or Simple Type
It is the one that is composed of a single behaviour model, by a single verb, such as:

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Article 103 Penal Code of Colombia. Murder. Whoever kills another will incur a prison of thirteen
(13) to twenty-five (25) years.
Article 220 Penal Code of Colombia. Injury. Whoever makes dishonourable charges to another
person will be imprisoned for one (1) to three (3) years and a fine of ten (10) to one thousand
(1,000) current monthly legal minimum wages.
 Compound Type
These are those types that have a plurality of behaviours (verbs) in their description, such as:
Art. 323. Money laundering. Whoever acquires, protects, invests, transport, transforms, stores,
conserves, custodies or manages goods…
These, in turn, can be complex compounds, where two or more behaviours are described. Each
one can form an autonomous type, but when they are linked with one another, they constitute an
independence that creates a new type, in this case the verbs are separated by the conjunction and.
Art. 149. Penal Code of Colombia. Illegal detention and deprivation of due process. "Anyone
who, on the occasion and in the course of an armed conflict, illegally deprives a person of his or
her liberty…
Mixed compound types can also be considered. They describe several behaviours, and it is
enough to execute one of them to fit the type.
Art. 414. Penal Code of Colombia. Prevarication by omission. "The public servant who omits,
delays, refuses or denies an act proper to his duties…"
 The complementary verb
As it is indicated, this verb complements. There may be a complementary verb in the type or there
may not be one.
Art. 239. Penal Code of Colombia. "Whoever seizes a movable property of another, with the
purpose of obtaining profit for himself or for another, will incur ...".
Art. 131. Penal Code of Colombia. "Anyone who fails, without just cause, to assist a person whose
life or health is in serious danger, will incur…