A girl who was 16 years old when she filed the complaint, starting with the age of 8, had been regularly raped by her brother. We capture the boy, and we arrest him. He tells me that his father used to have sexual relations with their mother, in front of the children and that he got violent quite often. He told me how they would throw him out many times, how he had to spend the night in the staircases of buildings, He looked at me, and gave a short answer: I get it. You're doing your job. I realized that I have a person in front of me who never had a chance in life, a person who went through hardships no one in this room could understand.
My name is Dan Constantinescu and I'm a prosecutor. A professor from the Faculty of Law at the University of Bucharest told us during a second-year course that, if we're studying law on a quest for justice, we came to the wrong course, we should've chosen philosophy. Back then, we laughed, but, 6 years later, I'm asking myself: Why isn't this the motto of the Faculty of Law? Today's speech was inspired by an experience I went through during my first year as an intern, from a file I dealt with. In a nutshell: A girl who was 16 years old when she filed the complaint, starting with the age of 8, had been regularly raped by her brother, and, during this time, she tried to kill herself twice.
For a bit more context: A poor family from a rural area, seven children, the parents are separated. I took care of the necessary documents, I conducted the hearings. Finally, we capture the boy, and we arrest him. He admits. After he's arrested, he asks to be heard by me. I call him to the hearing, and, in addition to the issues related to the crime, he tells me the following... He tells me that his father used to have sexual relations with their mother, in front of the children. It got violent quite often. He told me how they would throw him out many times, how he had to spend the nights in the staircases of buildings, how he would go to work during the day to make money, and buy food for his siblings because their parents wouldn't do this. He borrowed money from banks, once again, in order to help his siblings. Loans that he couldn't give back, so he went bankrupt. I said: Okay, I understand. You had a hard life, you lacked many things, but absolutely nothing you said justifies your misdeeds because they are so horrible, and they harmed your sister so much that she tried to kill herself. He looked at me, and gave a short answer: I get it. You're doing your job. In that moment, I felt stuck because I realized that I have a person in front of me who never had a chance in life, a person who went through hardships no one in this room could understand.
A person that, even though he commited those misdeeds with intent and was fully aware of his actions, was, in turn, the victim of a corrupt system, an indifferent system, a system in which total justice comes in only when the incident is sensationalistic, only when we repeat the same mistake too many times or, as of late, only if we spend the winter out on the streets. I chose to call my speech The procedure of the law because, in my point of view, right now, the criminal case is in a great crisis, meaning that it fulfills the objective conditions required by law, in order to achieve justice, but this concept is sort of quantified from the perspective of static criteria.
What I mean to say is that... Criminal justice is understood as being the removal of a social danger, and not as the prevention of said danger. And this way of thinking creates a sort of industrialization of the criminal case and robs it from the people's conscience, and transforms it from that defining moment that restores social order into a statistic with much too little concern for the human implications. I started this line of work with lots of enthusiasm.
Every case was important to me. And I still have this enthusiasm, and I hope I'll never lose it. Because the idea of justice is essential to me. It's that feeling that gives you hope, peace, and, most importantly, safety. But after this experience, I realized that what I do is actually very much in the post-factum zone.
So, I decided to look it up: what happens ante-factum? If we were to do a simple analysis, of the criminal cases of the last 10 years that ended up publicized on a national level, we notice that, most of them, were centered around cases of corruption that maybe weren't always that serious from the perspective of the investigation, but rather from the perspective of the people involved. Then, we have crimes that shock through their brutality, and I'm talking about murders, rapes, human trafficking.
I noticed that the great criminal cases, the thunderous convictions and acquittals, as of late, had influenced only minor legislative amendments of the sentences. The causes of these crime rates didn't get much spotlight, and, even worse, fighting them wasn't much of a priority. The lack of education, poverty, and lack of moral support alienate man from the idea of society, an idea which many don't even understand and, indirectly, this forces him to fight the very core of democracy, which are the social values defended by the penal code. The institutions specialized in social security are useless, if we don't offer them the necessary resources to accomplish their goals. It's no use fighting for the rights of the people locked up in prisons and detention centers, if we don't actually get involved in their reintegration.
It's no use convicting procurers, if we keep calling the victims whores. It's no use being horrified when we hear that the lives of some children were destroyed, if, at this time, in Romania, it is still assumed that a 12-year-old girl is mature enough to consent to sexual intercourse. In the aforementioned story, justice came down to an 8-year prison sentence. There weren't any institutional reforms, the causes that lead to such a phenomenon weren't taken into account, no solutions were proposed to help people in similar situations. Nothing.
What happened from my point of view? A procedure was followed and it satisfied the current goal of the justice system: a danger for society has been eliminated. In short: We did our job. And the next day we started all over again. Thank you!