The Notion of Infamous Penalties in the 19th-century Spanish Criminal Codes: Especial Consideration to Its Legal Effects and Purpose

Abstract

As it happened in the French criminal codification, the category of infamous penalties also existed in some Spanish criminal Codes enacted in the 19th century. The inexistence of studies that deal with the knowledge or idea that the authors of these Spanish Codes had about such category justifies that the present work deals with the notion of the infamous penalties in those normative bodies, and more specifically with the most important characteristics of this category of penalties: the legal effects suffered by the convicted to infamous penalties, and the purpose sought by the legislators with the infamous penalties. This study aims to reveal what justified that certain penalties could be considered infamous, leaving for future studies the analysis of the specific penalties that can be considered infamous.