Considerations about the delimitation between the concepts of author and participant: past, present and future

Abstract

As an amplifying device of the criminal act, the participation is a mechanism to impose
the penal sanction, keeping the principle of legality, the principle of the act and, at the
same time, avoiding impunity.
Its study was subject to the interpretative extension of the theory of equivalence
of conditions, which provided a unitary concept of author -without distinguishing it
from the participant in terms of the penalty to impose- and, therefore, denied the
importance of the contribution. This conception was overcome, later, by the restrictive
analysis of the subjective theories, which were displaced by the objective theories; but
both, aimed at providing criteria to differentiate (delimit) authorship and participation;
and equally, both subjected to criticism, from which arises the theory of the domain
of the fact. This last was developed by elements such as the positive and objective
domain of the act, and as the unjust culprit. The thesis was retaken and criticized
by Schünemann, regarding the offenses of duty infringement and instead proposes a
different concept.
Looking to the future, an uncertainty is glimpsed, led by the purest normativism, which,
although different from the theory of equivalence, does coincide in a unifying position
facing the author and the participant; point at which normativist theory arrives thanks
to a global assessment of the set of contributions that framed the behavior, forgetting
the individual relevance of each of the intervening parties and what they represent for
the behavior itself