Cybercrime Criminological Researches, Essay Example

Corpus delicti (body of crime) is a principle that has been applied in criminal law for a long time. It consists of two requirements of establishing the crime: the result and the proof that occurrence was a result of a person. Determining the identity of the perpetrator is not a requirement of establishing the corpus delicti. The various elements of crime individually do not indicate the body of the crime. As an example: if a person dies on the street, but there is no evidence that his or her death was a result of a criminal act of a person, the body of crime cannot be established. Likewise, if a person confesses to a murder, but the person he claims to have murdered is alive, there is no body of crime, therefore, prosecution is not initiated by the criminal law.

The law of the corpus delicti becomes hard to establish in cases of industrial spying, and conspiracies, for example. The loss of data can be established as a result, however, hackers might be able to erase all the traces of their criminal activities, and it is hard to prove “someone’s criminal act as the cause of the injury”. In these cases, reasonable doubt can occur. When there is  no certainty that there was a criminal agent involved, reasonable doubt makes the prosecution impossible. As an example, data loss as a result of industrial hacking would appear like a computer error, while it is not possible to prove that a criminal activity of a person was the cause of the loss. Corpus delicti is also hard to apply in negligence cases, as the fact that a person committed a willful and unlawful negligence is hard to prove. (Schmalleger and Hall pp.67 ) Gathering evidence that a person committed a willful criminal action, for example, is extremely hard to prove in cyber crime. Polivanyuk (2003) states that the requirements of “corpus delicti” for sentencing has been limiting governments’ ability to fight hackers. As the author states: “Thus, up to 1986 “… German police criminal statistics did not register computer crimes because there was no such corpus delicti”.

Works Cited

Polivanyuk, V.  Cybercrime Criminological Researches.  Retrieved from http://www.crime- research.org/library/Polivan0703eng.html 2003. Web.

Schmalleger, F. and Hall, D. Criminal Law Today. 2014. Print.