Criminal Law Review: Orientation

Introduction to Criminal Law

Welcome to this first session in our study of Criminal Law. Before we open the Revised Penal Code and start dissecting individual articles, we need to lay the groundwork. Every felony, every defense, every penalty we will discuss later rests on a small set of foundational ideas. If you understand these well, the rest of the subject becomes far easier to organize in your head. So let’s begin at the beginning.

What is criminal law

Criminal law is that branch of public law which defines crimes, treats of their nature, and prescribes the punishment for their commission. Notice the phrase public law. Unlike civil law, which generally governs the private relations between individuals, criminal law always involves the State as a party. When a crime is committed, the law presumes that society itself has been wronged, not just the private victim. That is why a criminal case is captioned People of the Philippines versus the accused, even if there is a private complainant who suffered actual harm. The private offended party may have a personal stake in the outcome, especially where civil liability is concerned, but the prosecution of the offense belongs to the State.

This public character of criminal law explains many of its peculiar features. It explains why an offended party generally cannot simply withdraw a criminal complaint once it has been filed, unlike a civil suit which the plaintiff is free to dismiss. It explains why pardon by the offended party does not, as a rule, extinguish criminal liability, unlike in purely civil disputes where the parties can always settle. And it explains why the rules on interpretation lean so heavily in favor of the accused, since the accused stands alone against the full machinery of the State.

Sources of Philippine criminal law

Our primary source of criminal law is the Revised Penal Code, which took effect on January 1, 1932. It was based largely on the old Spanish Penal Code of 1870, as adapted to Philippine conditions by the committee that drafted it. The Code is organized into two books. Book One covers the general principles that apply to crimes generally, things like criminal liability, the stages of execution, justifying and exempting circumstances, and the rules on penalties. Book Two defines and classifies the specific felonies themselves, from crimes against national security down to crimes against property.

Beyond the Code, criminal liability is also created by special penal laws passed by the legislature, and by presidential decrees and executive orders issued during periods when the executive exercised legislative power, particularly under martial law and the subsequent revolutionary government. Many of our most frequently litigated offenses today, such as the Comprehensive Dangerous Drugs Act, the Anti-Violence Against Women and Their Children Act, and the Cybercrime Prevention Act, are not found in the Revised Penal Code at all. They exist as separate special laws, and as we will see throughout this course, special laws sometimes follow different rules from the Code on matters like the application of mitigating and aggravating circumstances, the availability of the Indeterminate Sentence Law, and the relevance of criminal intent.

It is worth pausing here to clarify something many students get wrong. Jurisprudence, meaning the decisions of our courts, is not in itself a source of criminal law. The Philippines follows the civil law tradition on this point. Courts do not create new crimes. Only the legislature, through statute, can define an act as criminal and prescribe its penalty. This is the principle, expressed in the Latin maxim nullum crimen nulla poena sine lege, meaning there is no crime when there is no law punishing it. What our courts do is interpret and apply existing penal statutes to particular facts, and in doing so they build up a body of doctrine that guides how those statutes are understood. That doctrine is binding and indispensable to the practice of law, but it operates within the boundaries that the legislature has already set. A judge cannot punish an act, however reprehensible, if no statute makes it a crime.

The three characteristics of criminal law

Philippine criminal law is traditionally described as having three characteristics: it is general, it is territorial, and it is prospective.

Generality means that our penal laws are binding on all persons who live or sojourn in Philippine territory, regardless of their citizenship, religion, or status, subject only to the exceptions provided by treaty, by laws of preferential application, and by the generally accepted principles of public international law. The most familiar example of this last exception is diplomatic immunity. A duly accredited foreign ambassador, for instance, is not subject to the criminal jurisdiction of our courts, not because our law does not apply to the act, but because international law recognizes an exemption for persons holding that particular status.

Territoriality means that our penal laws are enforceable only within Philippine territory, which includes our land mass, our internal waters and archipelagic waters, our territorial sea, and our airspace. As a rule, a Filipino who commits a crime entirely outside the Philippines is not punishable under our Revised Penal Code. But this rule is not absolute. Article 2 of the Code itself provides several exceptions where Philippine criminal law follows the offender even outside our territory, such as when the offense is committed aboard a Philippine ship or airship, when it involves forging or counterfeiting Philippine currency or government obligations and securities, when it is committed by public officers or employees in the exercise of their functions, or when it constitutes a crime against the national security or the law of nations. We will spend an entire session later unpacking each of these extraterritorial exceptions, along with related doctrines on jurisdiction over foreign vessels and over offenses where the criminal act and its effect occur in different places.

Prospectivity means that a penal law applies only to acts committed after it takes effect. We do not punish a person for an act that was lawful when he did it, simply because a later law made that same act a crime. This is anchored on the constitutional prohibition against ex post facto laws. There is, however, one important qualification, and that is the principle of retroactivity in favor of the accused. Under Article 22 of the Revised Penal Code, a penal law that is favorable to the accused shall be given retroactive effect, even to a case already final, unless the accused is found to be a habitual delinquent. This is why, when a later statute reduces the penalty for an offense or decriminalizes an act altogether, persons already serving sentence under the old, harsher law may benefit from the change.

How penal statutes are construed

Because a criminal conviction can take away a person’s liberty or even his life, the rules on how we read penal statutes are deliberately tilted toward caution. Penal laws are construed strictly against the State and liberally in favor of the accused. This is often called the rule of lenity, or expressed through the maxim pro reo. In practice, this means that if a penal provision is genuinely capable of two interpretations, the courts will adopt the interpretation more favorable to the accused. It also means that courts will not extend a penal statute by implication to cover acts that the text does not clearly include, no matter how similar those acts may seem in spirit to what the law was trying to prevent. The remedy for a gap in the law is legislation, not judicial improvisation.

Two competing theories behind our criminal law

Scholars often explain the design of criminal law systems by reference to two competing schools of thought, the classical theory and the positivist theory, and it helps to understand both because our own Revised Penal Code is, in truth, a blend of the two.

Under the classical theory, man is viewed as a rational, freely choosing moral agent. When a person commits a crime, the theory assumes he did so through the exercise of his own free will and intelligence, and his criminal liability is therefore grounded in his moral guilt. The purpose of punishment under this view is retribution, society repaying the offender in proportion to the wrong he freely chose to commit. Because the focus is on the wrongful act itself rather than on the personal circumstances of the offender, classical systems tend to favor fixed, precisely defined penalties applied with mathematical consistency. Much of the original structure of the Revised Penal Code, with its graduated scales of penalties and its detailed periods, reflects this classical orientation.

The positivist theory takes a very different starting point. It views crime not as a product of pure free will but as a social and natural phenomenon, shaped by biological, psychological, and social factors that are often beyond the individual’s full control. Under this view, the offender is regarded less as a free moral agent to be punished and more as a person in need of correction or treatment, and the central purpose of the system shifts from retribution toward the protection of society and the prevention of future offenses. Positivist thinking is visible in features of our system such as the Indeterminate Sentence Law, which allows the penalty actually served to depend on the offender’s behavior and prospects for reform, the probation system, and the entire framework of restorative justice for children in conflict with the law.

Our Revised Penal Code is best understood as predominantly classical in its foundations, since it was drafted in an era when that theory dominated continental criminal law, but it has steadily absorbed positivist features over the decades through amendment and through complementary special legislation. Keeping both theories in mind will help you make sense of provisions that might otherwise seem inconsistent with each other, such as why some rules focus tightly on the act committed while others focus on the offender’s age, mental capacity, or potential for rehabilitation.

Felonies, offenses, and crimes

One last bit of vocabulary before we close. Strictly speaking, the term felony refers only to acts or omissions punishable under the Revised Penal Code. The term offense is reserved for violations of special penal laws. Crime is the broader, generic term that covers both. You will hear practitioners use these terms loosely in conversation, but in examination answers, precision matters, particularly because, as we will study later, felonies and offenses under special laws are not always governed by the same rules on criminal intent, on the stages of execution, or on the appreciation of modifying circumstances.

Where we go from here

In our next session, we will go deeper into the territorial and extraterritorial application of our criminal law, including how Philippine courts assume jurisdiction over crimes that begin in one place and produce their effects in another, and how jurisdiction operates over offenses committed aboard foreign vessels passing through our waters. After that, we will take up the distinction between crimes that are mala in se and those that are mala prohibita, which is one of the most heavily tested distinctions in the entire subject, since it determines whether criminal intent, motive, and the available defenses even matter to a particular charge.

That is enough for our introduction. In our next session, we build directly on these foundations.