Assessments regarding the offence of misleading the judiciary

Abstract

This paper considers the crime of misleading the judiciary, provided and sanctioned by Article 268 of the Criminal Code. If, in a completely informal way, incriminating texts could be reorganized according to their popularity, the misleading of the judiciary would most likely be among the least known, both in terms of legal professionals, as well as in the case of regular persons. Bad faith is not responsible for this situation, but most likely the relatively low incidence of the crime, coupled with the shyness with which both this and other crimes against justice are applied in practice. However, the offence provided by Article 268 of the Criminal Code has an importance that is difficult to neglect at the level of the entire legal system, starting from the concept of securing the judiciary whose historical roots stretch back to the beginning of civilization, thus accompanying the most rudimentary forms of justice. Even if, in essence, the concept of false accusation remains the same, the perspectives on it alternate over time, which generates a rich legal and doctrinal repertoire that revolves around it. If at the beginning the personal side of the incrimination predominated, being understood as a true deed directed against the person, today it appears, more and more frequently, as an objective deed, being more and more visible the ability to protect, par excellence, the activity of the criminal justice system. The new Criminal Code best captures this transition of the norm towards objectification, managing a visible distance from the old forms of crime. Against the background of this change of perspective, there is a need to debate and understand more clearly the specific mechanism of the crime of misleading the judiciary, to know what the elements of continuity are, novelty aspects of the text, but also its limits, in light its sine qua non status for all that means criminal justice. Fiat lux!