The unity of offence and the legal person. Specific conditions

Abstract

The conditions of the unity of the offence have been created for natural persons as subjects of criminal liability, but they must also be verified in regards to legal entities when they are involved in a criminal activity. From this perspective, this paper contains a selective analysis of some of those conditions which raise specific problems when the legal person is the perpetrator of a crime or where the solution is different from the hypothesis of natural persons. We will analyse both the conditions which are common to some of the forms of the unity of offence, such as the perpetrator identity and judicial consistency, as well as some specific ones, such as the condition of the unity of action required by the singular offence with multiple acts, the unity of the criminal subjective planning that must characterize the continuing offence and the manner in which the entire, continuing criminal activity can be reflected for the case of legal entities and, last but not least, the specific conditions of the offence of habit.