Criminal and Civil Liability in the Spanish Legal System
Criminal and Civil Liability
A- Liability for Crimes and Misdemeanors
116.1 CP: Every person criminally responsible for a crime or misdemeanor is also civilly liable if they cause damage or injury.
This means that a criminal defendant’s defense also applies to any civil or insurance claims arising from the same act. For example, bonds or attachments may be appealed.
B- Responsible Third Parties
Third parties can be held civilly liable, either directly or subsidiarily, as designated in the Spanish Criminal Code. This is without prejudice to the case proceeding when it meets criteria analogous to those identifying essential factors for monitoring responsibilities in respect of criminal damage, even with lesser guilt or objectification.
You can, at any time, urge them to pursue claims and powers corresponding to any party.
Your involvement in the process is necessary:
- a) From encouraging or agreeing that security measures against them.
- b) When you make civil claims in the writings of accusation (650.2 and 781.1: No determinations of the persons legally responsible for the writings of rating given): Required to transfer may submit written defense (652 and 784.1).
Your intervention is optional in the process:
As the civil claim is understated and does not cover fundamental rights, it is not necessary for people to participate in the process (analogous to a rebellious civil party), or appear in the trial if they have been cited (786), or extend writing to formulate a defense.
If they do, general rules of professional postulation and defense apply, except for mistakes.
Traffic Case Specific:
CP 117.1: Insurers who have assumed the risk of monetary liabilities arising from the use or exploitation of any property, business, industry, or activity have direct responsibility.
Procedural Treatment:
764 (short): “It will require the insurer or the Consortium for Compensation of Uninsured, if any, for that, so long as compulsory insurance secures civil liabilities.”
The entity responsible for the compulsory insurance will not be able to, as such, be part of the process, without prejudice to its right of defense to the obligations listed. It may not strengthen its position based on the admitted letter, decided on its understated position in the corresponding standard piece.
Debatable:
The insurer cannot interfere with their rights of defense and postulate and prove their lack of liability as any other person against whom claims are directed. It is settled jurisprudence that if a firm receives a criminal conviction for not having used the insurance, it cannot fight the civil responsibility condemned as the facts established constitute the action, subject to discussion, based on them, their liability, or which may even fight factual ends that would not change the behavior.
(Example: Extension of injuries)
The Purpose of Identification in the Process
Fact:
It is the historical event, which is to be human behavior, which is the subject of the process.
The naturalist theory is not the legal qualification that might be made of that fact. (Normative theory: fact = action described in the offense).
Maxima: “The process includes the fact from all points of view possible.”
Legal theory to support a naturalistic correction, not arbitrary dyes: Where there is disparity in the facts, which may extend to the subjective elements, if the core action remains under the criminal law and the same legal good is injured or endangered, the fact remains the identity.
“No matter however is providing conceptual and disparity of interpretations.
Casuistry:
a) “Continuing offense (art. 74 CP) prior adjudication” sanction exhausted all possible behaviors within the trial period? TS: No, doctrine, yes.
b) “Sometimes it is a fact that allows defining procedural facts: Crimes of mere activity or permanent (belonging to an armed, unpaid pensions): The prison does not break the accusation of successive acts within the behavior and allows you to estimate for the proceedings other than the above facts and after such acts, behind which is estimated to renewing a criminal intent.
B- Besides the person who is accused, the identity of the taxpayer.
Necessarily bounded instructional phase (STC 186/90, no one can be accused without being judicially imputed), the passive object of the understated phase of trial: defendant.
These two elements are identified in order for the proceedings to have external effects (res judicata, lis pendens) in relation to another process, and internal procedural effects (in fact substantial identity to imputation, sentencing policy perspective).
This implies that every element of the process object of apparent criminal infringements may be relevant to its rating: type, subjective elements, modifying circumstances, participation, etc.
Each offense, a process (300), maintained that basis necessarily along the process, without prejudice to connecting.
C- Incidence of the Legal Rating
1- All decisions made in the process or organ start from a judicial legal rating, either provisional or summary statement of fact and, where appropriate, of possible attributions to individual persons, since it derives its submission to the Spanish jurisdiction, the objective competence both by the seriousness of the crime and its nature of territorial jurisdiction, legitimacy, the kind of process, etc.
2- The law considers that the adversarial principle applies not to the variation in the facts on which the accusation is based, but to the variation in the legal imputation, so that there can be no conviction for an offense other than that for which the accused has been accused, except in the case of infringements of equal or lesser gravity, with good legal identity and homogeneity attacked in the common elements of both offenses (examples: burglary and theft).
Part of the doctrine discusses this, considering the effect of the defense law exclusively, considering that the state’s right to punishment is enabled by the imputation of a criminal fact to a person and cannot be constrained by the way that the accusation petition is legally codified, which is not entitled to such rights or punishment.
3- Also considered case law, also with strong opposition from part of the doctrine, which prevents the adversarial principle from sanctioning an offense that the accusation cannot exceed the specifically requested.
20/12/2006 Full STS: Binding punishment to the judge specifically ordered in any process; 27/11/2007 Full STSor: The Court cannot impose a punishment greater than the most serious of the charges requested, provided that the penalty requested corresponds to the legal provisions in this regard, so that when the sentence is omitted or does not reach the minimum provided by law, it should impose the sentence in any case, my punishment prescribed for the offense object of condemnation.
5- The Questions
The assessment of the existence of a crime depends not only on the material facts objectively apprehended, but also on concepts, relationships, and legal situations regulated by other sectors of the legal system than the criminal law (STS, 5 November 1991).
The criminal legal standard should be integrated into its course in fact legal elements of other orders that are questionable, i.e., capable of integrating themselves into the subject of civil, administrative, fiscal, or labor litigation and, therefore, the object of criminal proceedings.
Example: Alien thing, appropriation of title of ownership; injustice and arbitrariness in prevarication; share in disappointed fiscal offense.
It questions implies control, not valuation. No need for a definition of the offense under criteria of another section of order.
General principle: The issues are not returnable: We decided by the judge.
Art 3 Lecro: The criminal court, for the sole purpose of suppression, has to solve jurisdictional civil or administrative matters, or any other legal order, provided that these are linked in an intimate way with the criminal whose application is being considered.
It is entirely consistent with general criteria: Art 10.1. LOPJ: For the sole purpose referred to, each court order may hear matters that are not exclusive powers.