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The Digital Transition in Criminal Trials: New Promises, New Risks, New Challenges

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Investigating and Preventing Crime in the Digital Era

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Abstract

There is probably no field of social life which has not undergone radical changes in light of the ongoing digital transition, and the consequent transformation of almost every human activity. Law enforcement and criminal procedure could not lag behind these phenomena. It is therefore no surprise that a shift towards to new digital techniques has more or less slowly characterised the evolution of every criminal justice system.

This contribution critically analyses the main results of the researches collected in this volume, with the aim of highlighting the tensions between conflicting interests and values, but also the difficult trade-offs that ICT instruments today require, if not always to improve, at least to maintain sustainable levels of fairness in the administration of criminal justice. Doubtless, investigative and procedural fairness remains the ultimate goal of modern criminal justice systems, and mostly of European case-laws, and this goal can surely not be abandoned in our digitalised world. Focusing on the new promises, the new risks, and finally the new challenges concerned with the digital transition in the fields of criminal proceedings and crime prevention provides a useful fil rouge to grasp the complexity of the ongoing evolution of criminal justice.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    See Galgani (2022), pp. 1 ff.

  2. 2.

    Ibid., p. 2.

  3. 3.

    Several European countries—such as Germany, Italy, and Spain—provide clear examples of such phenomenon. See the contributions of Foti and Di Nuzzo with extensive references to cyber-intercepts, and search and seizure of digital evidence, respectively.

  4. 4.

    Orlando, Sect. 3.

  5. 5.

    Ibid.

  6. 6.

    Militello, Sect. 2.2.

  7. 7.

    Militello, Sect. 3.

  8. 8.

    Capograssi (1959), p. 57; Ferrua (2017), pp. 16 ff.

  9. 9.

    Falcone, Sect. 3.

  10. 10.

    Falcone, Sect. 6.

  11. 11.

    Lasagni, Sect. 4.1.

  12. 12.

    Ibid.

  13. 13.

    In this sense Lasagni, Sect. 5.

  14. 14.

    This phenomenon, moreover, is of an extremely complex nature, and certainly is not only concerned with cybercrimes, or offences ascertained through digital instruments. Criminal law scholarship has long studied the repercussions on the nullum crimen sine lege principle of such interaction between procedural and substantive criminal law, whereby the scope of open-structured criminal law provisions is often largely dependent on the results of evidentiary procedures and fact-finding. The outcome is a clear procedural (re)definition of the characteristics of criminal offences, which can thus not be established ex ante but ex post facto, that is, during the criminal process and by means of procedural tools. Among others, criminal scholars at the University of Pisa have devoted a great part of their studies to this highly delicate topic, starting with Prof. Tullio Padovani: see Padovani (1999), pp. 527 ff. Cf. also Gargani (2017), p. 95; Gargani (2013), p. 844; Gargani (2016), pp. 81 ff.

  15. 15.

    CJEU, Digital Rights Ireland and Others, judgement of 8 April 2014, Joined Cases C-293/12 and C-594/12, para. 37.

  16. 16.

    In this sense see also Foti, Sect. 3.

  17. 17.

    Neroni Rezende, Sect. 5.2.1.

  18. 18.

    ECtHR, Grand Chamber, Big Brother Watch and Others v. United Kingdom, judgement of 25 May 2021, Appl. Nos. 58170/13, 62322/14 and 24960/15.

  19. 19.

    Pellegrino, Sect. 2.

  20. 20.

    ECtHR, Grand Chamber, Big Brother Watch and Others v. United Kingdom, para. 333. See recently, among others, Bachmaier Winter (2021), pp. 317 ff.

  21. 21.

    Both quotations can be read in ECtHR, Kruslin v. France, judgment of 24 April 1990, Appl. No. 11801/85, para. 35.

  22. 22.

    Para. 20.

  23. 23.

    Some national legislation also provides indications that may appear to support this approach. For instance, Italian law distinguishes between a suspicion of guilt (gravi indizi di colpevolezza) as a condition for remand detention and further pre-trial restrictions on liberty and the right to free moment, and a suspicion of commission of the alleged offence (gravi indizi di reato) to justify telephone interception and today digital intercepts. See respectively Arts. 273 and 267 CPC. A great part of case law and legal scholarship shares the approach summarised in the text. See among others Negri (2004), pp. 107 ff., 112 f. I have already expressed my concerns about this interpretation in Ruggeri (2022), para. 2.1.

  24. 24.

    In continental Europe, criminal law scholarship has long acknowledged the so-called Doppelstellung of criminal intent or negligence, that is, their double relevance as subjective elements and expressions of the structure of the alleged offence, which makes them essential elements for the complex assessment of Tatbestandsmäßigkeit. See among others, albeit with some differences, Jescheck and Weigend (1996), pp. 429 f.; Donini (1999), p. 257.

  25. 25.

    This is the case for Italy, where the code of criminal procedure does not specifically regulate a number of relevant digital investigative techniques, which are still largely justified on the basis of general provisions, such as those laying down the principle of exhaustiveness of the prosecutorial inquiry and the admissibility of the so-called ‘atypical evidence’. See Di Nuzzo, Sect. 4. I have also expressed some criticisms about this approach, not only since it frustrates the requirement of a clear and precise legal basis, but furthermore because of the inappropriateness of such general clauses, which are not able to justify any measure of investigation. In particular, the clause regarding atypical evidence relates to evidence-gathering procedures at trial, and is therefore by definition inadequate to legitimise the autonomous investigative intervention of law enforcement authorities in the pre-trial phase. Cf. Ruggeri (2021), pp. 854 f. Moreover, it should be taken into account that some important digital measures of investigation, such as search and seizure of digital evidence, today find a legal basis in cross-border cases through the implementation of the EIO Directive. See Di Nuzzo, Sect. 2.

  26. 26.

    Art. 18(2) of the Swiss CPC.

  27. 27.

    Falcone, Sect. 5.3.

  28. 28.

    Id., Sect. 2.

  29. 29.

    Falcone, Sect. 5.3.

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  1. Law Department, University of Messina, Messina, Italy

    Stefano Ruggeri

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  1. Law School, Complutense University Madrid, Madrid, Spain

    Lorena Bachmaier Winter

  2. Law Department, Messina University, Messina, Italy

    Stefano Ruggeri

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Ruggeri, S. (2022). The Digital Transition in Criminal Trials: New Promises, New Risks, New Challenges. In: Bachmaier Winter, L., Ruggeri, S. (eds) Investigating and Preventing Crime in the Digital Era. Legal Studies in International, European and Comparative Criminal Law, vol 7. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13952-9_10

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