Criminal imputation in the environment of the third-party organization?: The chilean case of criminal liability of legal persons

Abstract

This paper focuses on the most controversial element of legal persons’ criminal liability in Chile: the requirement that the individual’s crime must be a “consequence” of the legal person’s infringement of management and supervisory duties. In order to overcome the possible incompatibility of such condition with the principle of self-determination that governs personal criminal responsibility, the article proposes to develop differentiated and complementary imputation criteria that allow coexistence of individual and corporate liability. The final proposal rejects the “behavioral” analogy in the reconstruction of the illicit of the legal entity and invites to consider the generation of “processes” as a manifestation of the organization’s will in the social reality. Within this framework, it presents “the organization’s dominance over the process” as the main factor in causing liability.