Aplicación del principio de congruencia entre la acusación y la sentencia dentro de los procesos penales.

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to establish the importance of the correct application of the principle of congruence in the penal system. In the current legal system, the Integral Organic Criminal Code does not establish, define or recognize, in its substantive or adjective part, the principle of congruence, which has led many lawyers to be unaware of this principle and its correlation to the accusation in the indictment and the sentence. In criminal matters, the scope of the principle of congruence is unknown, especially when a sentence contains a legal qualification of a criminal nature, different from the one established in the indictment by the prosecution. This leads to the fact that many criminal sentences are appealed, because it is thought that the congruence between the crimes charged and the crimes for which the defendant was convicted in the sentence is violated. With these legal problems, it is being proposed to reform Art. 622 of the COIP and add in the last paragraph that "all sentences issued in criminal proceedings must observe the principle of congruence between the judge's motivation and the factual facts proven in the trial". This may help to dissolve doubts as to whether the congruence is about the prosecutor's accusation (the crimes charged in the indictment) or about the facts proven in the trial.