La facultad de perdonar: conmutación de penas y división de poderes

Abstract

In the second half of the 19th century the acceptance of the division of powers, separation of morality and religion of the law and the absolutism of the law, they were answering to a project where the just thing was being defined by the legislation and the administration of justice was seeking to be conceived as independent power. In this context, the power to forgive, inherited from the Spanish monarchy as the king attribution, went to the people, sovereign in the democratic system, which delegated it in its representatives. But a conflict was generated then between the need to modernize the criminal justice system, the abolition of the death penalty and the relationship between the branches of government. The aim of this article is to understand and measure the meaning of this power to forgive that it was granted to the governor of the province of Buenos Aires in 1877, when the law was passed regulating the allocation of executive power to commute sentences.