Abstract
The general mitigating and aggravating circumstances of criminal liability are elements attached to the crime that, when they occur, affect the punishment quantum. Cuban criminal legislation provides a catalog of such circumstances and some general conditions for their application. Such norms give judges broad discretion in assessing circumstances and adjusting punishment based on the intensity of those circumstances. In the interest of broad judicial discretion, the law does not establish specific ways for measuring circumstances’ intensity. This gives judges more freedom and autonomy, but it also imposes on them more social responsibility and challenges them to manage the uncertainty and subjectivity inherent in this complex activity. This paper proposes a model to aid the linguistic assessment of circumstances’ intensity and to provide linguistic and numerical recommendations to determine an appropriate punishment interval. M-LAMAC determines the collective evaluation of circumstances of the same type, determines the prevalence of a type of circumstance by means of a compensation function, recommends the required modification in the input interval, and finally recommends a numerical interval adjusted to the judges’ initially expressed preferences. The model’s applicability is demonstrated by means of several experiments on a fictitious case of bank document forgery.
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Notes
In Spanish: Consejo de Gobierno del Tribunal Supremo Popular (CG-TSP). The CG-TSP is the collegiate governing body of the Supreme People’s Court.
In Spanish: Asamblea Nacional del Poder Popular (ANPP).
In Spanish: Comisión de Asuntos Constitucionales y Jurídicos (CACJ).
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Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank the editor and reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions that allowed us to improve the work considerably. Also, we would like to thank Professors Antonio Martino, Gabriel Rodríguez Pérez de Agreda, Carlos Alberto Mejías, and Luciano García Garrido for their comments on an early draft.
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Rodríguez Rodríguez, C.R., Amoroso Fernández, Y., Zuev, D.S. et al. M-LAMAC: a model for linguistic assessment of mitigating and aggravating circumstances of criminal responsibility using computing with words. Artif Intell Law (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10506-023-09365-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10506-023-09365-8