Concealment is the act and consequence of covering up : hiding something or preventing it from being known. The notion is used in the field of law to refer to a criminal act that involves participation in a crime after its execution, helping those responsible not to be discovered .
The person who conceals the crime is therefore not the person who commits the main crime . It is someone who, by his conduct, hinders or prevents the State from acting when it comes to investigating and punishing the crime in question. It can be said that the person who conceals the perpetrators of a crime protects them.
Concealment is a 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 has committed a robbery . The boy offers the criminal asylum in his home and then, when he is summoned by the authorities to testify, he claims that he does not know where the robber is, claiming that he has not seen him for a long time. In this case, a cover-up occurs.
However, if an individual lies to avoid exposing a co-worker who missed work with a fabricated excuse, he or she is not committing a cover-up in the legal sense, since being absent from work without reason does not imply a crime.
It should be noted that concealment may have aggravating factors (depending on the severity of the crime or when the conduct is carried out to obtain an economic benefit, for example), but also exempting or mitigating factors (if a family member is concealed).
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 in a coherent manner on different criminals, through a series of phases that allow them to be specified without any of them receiving a sentence less than appropriate.
There is, however, an exception to the rule that can exempt a criminal from punishment , and that is concealment among relatives . This does not mean that the Penal Code does not recognize that this is a culpable, 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 concealers are those who have an emotional bond with the criminal, such as his spouse, his parents, his children and his siblings, among other relatives.
Of course, this does not mean that in any case of concealment between relatives a penalty can be applied. On the contrary, those who conceal the person who committed the crime in order 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 when he discovers that he has acted outside the law, as it is for him 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 the same way if they discovered that a relative had committed a crime: some would report him, despite their emotional ties, simply to respect the balance of society , while others would do everything possible to protect him.