About the So-called Parot Doctrine: The Granting of Penitentiary Benefits in Cases of Accumulation of Sentences

Abstract

In 2006, the Spanish Supreme Court adopted its famous Parot doctrine (STS 197/2006, of February 28), with which established that, in cases of accumulation of penalties with limitation of the period of successive compliance, the remission of penalties for work would be applied on each individual penalty considered, instead of on the maximum penalty (the fixed limit), as had been done until then. That doctrine, which was only applicable to convicted persons under the rules of the 1973 Code, would later be invalidated by the European Court of Human Rights, on the understanding that they had been violated with it, and to the detriment of the convicted persons, due to a retroactive application of the new formula of computing prison benefits, arts. 7 and 5 of the European Convention on Human Rights. In these pages, we will present and evaluate this interpretation and, at the end of the paper, an answer will be given to the question whether it would be possible to follow such a criterion of the attribution of penitentiary benefits with the sanctioning rules of the real competition of crimes of the Penal Code of 1995. Our approach will take place from the perspective of the imputation of prison benefits in cases of accumulation of sentences.