The plurality of offences in the law regulating the criminal responsibility of minors. Initial legal-criminal treatment and current law

Abstract

This contribution is dedicated to the legal-criminal treatment of the plurality of crimes in the law regulating the criminal responsibility of minors. Once explained what a concurrence of offences is and what are its classes, we enter into the initial regulation of the plurality of crimes in the Spanish juvenile criminal law to address its current treatment and the plurality of crimes and situations that do not constitute a concurrence of offences because the crimes are not temporarily related to each other. Particular attention will be paid to the maximum limits of duration of the measures in each case and to some of the issues that have given rise to more controversy with the historical and current regulation, as is the case, for example, with respect to the current regulations, of the concept of relatedness. Although these are different systems, and the purposes of juvenile criminal law and adult criminal law do not coincide, the regulation of the plurality of crimes in the law regulating the criminal responsibility of minors is related to that offered for those same cases by the Criminal Code where the comparison between one and the other rules for determining legal-criminal punishment may have some interest. As we will have occasion to see, the current regulations, unlike what happens in the Code, choose to unify the punitive treatment of concurrence, in all its forms, and of continued crime, a solution that should be well received.