Jurado de conciencia como instrumento de participación democrática en el sistema penal acusatorio Colombiano.

Abstract

The discussion on democratic participation within the penal systems has been a debate in which some doctrinants have highlighted the importance of the Juries of Conscience as an instrument for the materialization of democratic principles. These Juries of Conscience are made up of citizens elected through a lottery, being called to assume the responsibility of making objective decisions on the degree of responsibility and guilt of the defendants. The antecedents of democratic participation in criminal systems come from the English Criminal Procedure Law, a system in which citizens have a long history of participation in judicial processes through the Jury of Conscience. The importance of this figure lies in the usefulness of not leaving decision-making of this nature to a single person, seeking to avoid, to a greater extent, subjectivity in the application of judicial decisions The Jury of Conscience in Colombia was in the legal system since 1853, but then it was suppressed in 1989 by Decree 1861 of August 18, 1989 (Presidency of the Republic of Colombia, 1989), suppression that was ratified by the Supreme Court of Justice and debated in public opinion by jurists and journalists. At that time, the Juries of Conscience were made up of three citizens, previously designated in a lottery to make decisions in trials against individuals prosecuted for crimes such as homicide. The arguments at stake discussed the complications and problems within the context of the administration of criminal justice, which, as Ismael Arenas (Arenas, 1990) highlights, “its material and human mechanisms had a serious impact on the course of the trials and, even, it pointed to them as a preponderant factor of impunity ”. Tobón (Tobon Camacho, 2015) records the discussion in the same sense, recognizing that the positions were divided between, those who argued that it had been a wise decision to consider the Juries of Conscience as the fastest way to impunity, and the others , which argued its elimination as a violation of the democratic participation of citizens in the administration of justice. With the implementation of the accusatory criminal system through Law 906 of 2004, the constitutional reform contained in Legislative Act 03 of 2002 was developed, reforming articles 116 and 250 of the Political Constitution of Colombia, applying changes to the Colombian Criminal Procedure System in in relation to its acts, institutions and procedures applicable to this new criminal prosecution system, but omitting the figure of the Jury of Conscience, leaving it without an exhaustive regulation in the Code of Criminal Procedure. Faced with this normative and constitutional context, it is intended to carry out an analysis in which the accusatory system is analyzed, establishing its own characteristics and comparing laws of countries such as the United States, Spain and France, emphasizing the evolution that the Jury has had of Conscience as an essential part in the implementation of this kind of criminal prosecution system. This analysis will be built from the recognition of the Jury of Conscience as a manifestation of the principle of democratic participation, to avoid arbitrariness and oppression of a single individual in the application of criminal justice.