La íntima convicción en la valoración de la prueba.

Abstract

Intimate conviction consists of that freedom that the judge or jury has at the time of assessing the evidence, which is based only on subjective notions such as morals, beliefs or knowledge, subjective notions that hinder the motivation of the decision. The rules of reasoned judgment must be distinguished from the intimate conviction, although both are part of the system of free evaluation of proof. Reasoned judgment is based on rules of logic, experience, scientific knowledge; all of them contribute to the motivation of the decision. Daniel González Lagier describes the intimate conviction as fallacy for lacking epistemology sustenance. There is -said González- a high degree of probability that it can cause arbitrariness in decisions, because it is only interested in the conviction of the judge, not in how the judge came to that conviction. On that basis this paper has been proposed to review three theoretical points of view about intimate conviction belonging to González Lagier, Gascón Abellán y Laudan, and then, to examine two decisions of the Ecuadorian Constitutional Court, which contains insights on the intimate conviction, in order to contrast them with the revised theoretical perspectives.