The act and consequence of concealing is called concealment : hiding something or preventing it from being known. The notion is used in the field of law to refer to a criminal action that involves participation in a crime after its execution, helping to ensure that those responsible are not discovered .
The person who carries out the cover-up, therefore, is not the person who commits the main crime . This is someone who, due to his or her conduct, hinders or prevents state action when investigating and punishing the act in question. It can be said that he who covers up the perpetrators of a crime protects them.
Concealment is conduct that tends to make the administration of justice impossible. For this figure to exist, a crime must first have been committed. If what is being concealed is not a crime defined in the corresponding legal code, there is no such thing as concealment.
Suppose a young man knows that his neighbor committed a robbery . The boy offers the criminal asylum in his home and then, when he is summoned by the authorities to give testimony, he states that he does not know where the thief is, stating that he has not seen him for a long time. In this case, a cover-up occurs.
On the other hand, if an individual lies to avoid reporting a colleague who missed work with a made-up excuse, he or she does not incur a cover-up in the legal sense, since being absent from work without reason does not imply a crime.
It should be noted that in concealment there may be aggravating factors (depending on the seriousness of the crime or when the conduct is carried out to obtain an economic benefit, for example), but also excuses or mitigating circumstances (if a family member is covered up).
Criminal Law requires that the sentence imposed on a criminal be directly related to the seriousness of the crime he has committed, his personality and the circumstances surrounding the act. This can be encompassed in the concept of individualization of punishment , a process that allows sanctions to be imposed coherently on different criminals, through a series of phases that allow them to be carried out without any of them receiving a sentence less than the appropriate one.
There is, on the other hand, an exception to the rule, which can exempt an offender from the penalty , and it is cover-up between relatives . This does not mean that the Penal Code does not recognize that it is a guilty, unlawful and typical action, but that there is a reason to "forgive", so to speak, the subject. The people exempt from the penalties that are usually imposed on accessories are those who have an emotional bond with the criminal, such as their spouse, parents, children and siblings, among other family members.
Of course, this does not mean that in any case of cover-up between relatives a penalty can be applied. On the contrary, people who cover up the person who committed the crime to benefit from the result will be sentenced, as well as those who participated in the planning phase or acted as accomplices. In other words, it is not the same for a father to try to protect his son upon discovering that he has acted outside the law than to organize a robbery with him and then prevent the authorities from punishing him.
Needless to say, each person has a different point of view regarding cover-up among relatives, because not everyone would act in the same way if they discovered that a family member had committed a crime: some would expose them, despite their sentimental bond, simply to respect the balance of society , while others would do everything possible to protect it.