In the judicial field, contumacy arises when a defendant refuses to appear at trial.
Contumacia , from the Latin contumacia , is the tenacity and hardness of persisting in an error . The term is used in the law linked to default, when a defendant refuses to appear at trial .
The defendant, therefore, incurs contumacy when he does not attend court to acquit those charges that are formulated in an investigation . Contumaciousness requires the accusation of a crime and that the accused be aware of its prosecution: by disobeying the court order and not going to court, one becomes contumacious.
What is contumacy
Contumacy can be understood as the defendant's willingness to distance himself from the judicial process , which prevents his effective trial. Given this attitude , the court can decree the contumacy of the accused, who from that moment on can be detained with the aim of being taken back to the trial.
The classification of a defendant as contumacious implies an attitude assumed by him towards the judicial process. Its absence implies a behavior that conveys opposition to the implementation of the steps implicit in any process undertaken by Justice .
Judges, in any case, must analyze the causes that produce the absence of the accused to confirm whether contumacy has occurred or if the absence is linked to other reasons.
Contumacy was a legal institution of the Inquisition.
The concept in the Inquisition
In the processes of the Inquisition , the condition of one who fled or who was not present when the court required it was known as contumacia or Contumatia. For inquisitorial law, contumacy proved the guilt of the accused.
Contumacy was one of the many concepts related to inquisitorial law , which was characterized by applying the legal principle of officialdom, which allowed the judge or the court to actively participate in the process, adding their own claims and allegations before issuing a sentence ; Currently, the adversarial principle is used (also called dispositive or accusatory), which guarantees that each part of the legal body fulfills different functions and that they do not overlap.
Contumacy and other legal institutions
A person accused of witchcraft or heresy was not necessarily condemned to burn at the stake, although this did not mean that there were no consequences to the persecution of the Inquisition. Depending on his position in the inquisitorial error , a Christian could occupy one of the following categories: abiuratio , protestatio , relapsia , purgatio , contumatia ( contumacy ) and pertinatia . Let's see below what each one consisted of:
* protestatio : for certain historians, it is the first legal institution to anticipate the inquisition. When delivering a literary work to a printer, for example, writers included a preventive self-criticism, the protestatio, which was composed of the professio fidei , the cautio , and the declaratio . In summary, the authors expressed belonging to the Catholic Church and following its mandates, they declared they were unaware if part of their works failed to comply with the precepts of religion and they accepted the potential consequences of their errors (such as the correction of part of their texts);
* purgatio : it was a public oath originating in Rome that was sworn in front of witnesses who shared the same social status and that arose as a direct consequence of a denunciation (the diffamatio ) and the consequent suspicion of the inquisitor (the suspicia ): when the defamed person She was not purged, she was excommunicated and considered contumacious;
* abiuratio : when the accused person recognized his fault and declared himself repentant or publicly rejected the commission of heresy;
* relapsy : the condition of one who committed a heresy, which ended without exception in a death sentence;
* pertinatia : if the accused person insisted on error, on heresy, he or she was considered pertinacious and, as occurred with relapse, the death sentence was inevitable.