IL CRITERIO DEL BEYOND ANY REASONABLE DOUBT NELLA RESPONSABILITA' DELLE PERSONE GIURIDICHE. STUDIO POLITICO CRIMINALE E SULLA FINALITA' DELLA PENA

The thesis argues that there are no good reasons to justify the liability of legal persons, for the endangerment or ham to one of us, should be classified as criminal offense, even when the norm of unfulfilled conduct is precisely a penalty one. To assume that a company might be punish for its ex-crime participation does not imply that it should be penalized, with a criminal offense. The reason for this is that one of the fundamental elements of the penal system, the standard of reasonable doubt, is not justified in the attribution of responsibility of moral entities. In addition, in the criminal procedure, as it does not happen in other matters, the so-called search for truth is only one of the components - necessary, but not sufficient - of the adjudicative activity. In criminal law, we needed a special configuration between the balance of other necessary interests, such as social peace (civility), human dignity (otherness), costs and the stability of decisions that imply that not necessarily the true decision is the correct. To this we should added, more than outstandingly, the moral imperative to prevent the conviction of innocent people. This means that the regulation of standard of proof is influenced by epistemic, counter-epistemic and extra-epistemic reasons, which limit or condition the evidence of the jury or trial finder, making the task of imputation difficult. Therefore, the different processes (criminal, administrative and civil) have different epistemic, extra-epistemic and counter-epistemic rules. In the case of legal persons, there are no reasons to be applied the rules of the criminal procedure. In fact, the structure of the criminal justice system, its principles and guarantees, certainly allow that someone who is actually guilty, that is, who committed the crime, to escape the punish, which indirectly increases the incentives of other possible offenders to commit crimes, but above all, it generates an impact of impunity on the victims. If we considered that criminal law has the mission of protecting the most important human’s values, the previous trade-off would be debatable with respect to an entity that, basically, has an economic ethos and that does not necessarily share fundamental human values, let alone recognize it - because he does not recognize the victim as a moral alter ego. Society should design policies to reduce conducts classified as a crime, not incentivize it, even not directly. The thesis concludes that legal entities are not worthy of deserving our criminal law, they do not deserve that the State limits itself, as it does with natural persons, in the use of the ius puniendi, either to control the sources of risk or to sanction the harms they cause to people.