El procedimiento abreviado en la ley 20.931

Abstract

The Criminal Procedure Code introduced in Chile in the year 2000 regulated the possibility of an agreement between the prosecutor and the accused that seeks to avoid trial in a very restrictive way. Law 20.931 abandoned this notion, instituting instead, for crimes of theft and robbery, a system of incentives that could produce a massive number of sentences based on agreements that prize the accused with considerable reductions in penalties. This article criticizes the fragmentation of the penal justice system that this new law creates. Furthermore, it attempts to explore the following issue: to what extent could the new subsystem, destined to favor agreements with regards to robbery and theft, be subjected to the criticism generally levelled at the United States justice system, in the sense that it constitutes a system of unilateral adjudication from the side of the prosecutor.