O crime de ofensas à integridade física graves

: em especial os conceitos de gravidade, de permanência, de incurabilidade e de doença particularmente dolorosa

Abstract

The purpose of this dissertation is to analyse the crime of serious offences against the physical integrity punished by article 144 of the Penal Code, specifically with regard to the provisions of Its paragraphs a) and c). This article has always raised great doubts due to its wording, such doubts do not allow a unanimous doctrinal or jurisprudential understanding. The discussion starts precisely from the subjectivity and imprecision of the concepts referred to in the paragraphs of the aforementioned article, which make the criminal response depend on something that seems difficult to define. Although all the situations referred to in this article could give rise to discussions of enormous interest and relevance, in the short term, I will focus on those that I still found to be underexplored - the concepts of severity, permanence, incurability and, even, disfigurement, particularly painful disease and psychic anomaly. This discussion seems to me to be crucial both for the application of criminal law and for a coherent subsumption of factual situations to the legal type in question. The imprecision of the wording forces us to question where is the limit that allows us, in a concrete case, to define an illness or disfigurement as permanent, a psychic anomaly as incurable or an illness as particularly painful. How will we know which cases will be likely to fulfil the requirements demanded by article 144 of the Penal Code while this limit is not clearly defined? On what can we make the requirement of permanence depend? How can we claim to be facing a particularly painful disease when science studies pain as a personal and subjective phenomenon? Why does the legal solution seem to be more demanding in the case of disfigurement than illness? Is incurability a synonym of permanence? And in the case of illness, is pain the same indicator of severity that is referred to in the case of disfigurement? The answer to these questions will be the focus of this study.

Date of Award	12 Jul 2023
Original language	Portuguese
Awarding Institution	Universidade Católica Portuguesa
Supervisor	Maria da Conceição Cunha (Supervisor)