Ulises Francisco Espaillat (1823-1878), who was President of the Republic (from April to October 1876), stated: “The Law and only the Law is called to save this Society. It is necessary, it is essential that Justice be a truth”. Nice words, but far away in our reality.
That Justice to which Espaillat refers, if we ask a member of the common and humble people to tell us about it, surely he will refer, exclusively, to criminal justice.
That is, for the lower classes of the social scale, and even for nuclei of the national middle class, Justice is criminal justice. This for several reasons, among which are that criminal justice is the one that most affects them, to a certain extent criminal justice operates, in practice, to exclude the poor. Another reason is that this is the one that could sanction administrative corruption. Also, which is the one with the most press. A million dollar transaction as a result of a bank merger is not news, a homicide could be.
For this reason, in the surveys on Justice, the assessment corresponds, basically, to criminal justice and from there it expands to other areas.
Criminal justice is the vanguard of Justice. As she is perceived by the population, Justice will go. And, in the surveys, historically, concerns about the state of the same are reflected with expressions, normally, negative.
In this regard, the work of criminal judges faces external and internal factors that contribute to the poor perception that an important part of the population may have about it. Among these factors, we can note the following:
External: (i) politics and the pressure exerted by (ii) the “real factors of power”, both traditional and modern.
Internal: (iii) the character of the judge and the pressures with (iv) transfers and disciplinary submissions.
On the other hand, there is the action of the (v) Public Ministry, the other column on which the criminal justice system rests, which also has its pressures, its economic and technical problems and its own agenda.
(i) Politics: politics is transversal to everything and everyone, it exerts an omnipresent influence.
We have a deficit State in a general sense. All the estates of the same lack of resources, which are never sufficient for the normal functioning of the activities of the same. In addition, corruption, public and private, takes part of them under its fingernails.
Also, Justice has been used to confront, limit or exclude political (and perhaps even commercial) opponents. So, with a) administrative corruption and b) persecution of opponents; obviously who or who hold power, have always wanted to control justice, essentially criminal justice. The other point would be c) self-protection when leaving power.
This political control over the Judiciary operates in several ways, the direct one is by placing a comrade in the presidency of the same, generally with legal and academic conditions, but other times without these. In any case, for the political heights, the main thing is the affiliation and dependency so that this, from the judicial Olympus, operates in favor of partisan causes.
Until now it has been like that.
