From delação to colaboração premiada: the history of modernization practices in brazilian criminal justice system

Abstract

Delação and colaboração premiada are terms used to describe legal practices which, although they are understood to be identical, have significant differences. The aim of the research on which this paper is based was to understand the genesis of these practices and the logic of the distinction between them, considering them as the result of social disputes mediated by professionals with unequal technical and social skills. It also sought to understand the objective meaning of the transformations of Brazilian criminal justice in neoliberal contemporaneity. The research originates in the characterization of the practices through the documentary examination of the criminal cases in which they were employed between 1990 and 2021, then analyzed from the point of view of the strategies of professional mobility and social legitimation of their practitioners in the face of the contemporary challenges of criminal justice. It was identified that the practices are part of efforts to modernize criminal justice based on internationally recognized best practice systems. It was found that the practice of colaboração premiada is structured as a private contract between equal parties and regulated by the principle of legal certainty. The practice of delação premiada, on the other hand, is structured by the asymmetry of power between the parties in the criminal process and regulated by the principle of uncertainty. It was concluded that the logic of differentiation between the practices corresponds to the logic of social distinction between their respective objects: economic elites and small-time drug dealers, as well as to the logic of professional distinction between their respective subjects: the groups of agents specialized in economic crimes and the vast contingent of agents who routinely carry out most of the work of criminal repression.