Control Judges in Mexico. a New Legal Body

Control Judges in Mexico. A new legal body

Control judges in Mexico are a new legal body within the system of justice in Mexico. The creation of these operators comes from the implementation of the oral accusatory system by means of the Constitutional Reform in Criminal Matter in 2008. This system is divided into different stages, and for every stage there is a judge.

The first stage refers to everything that concerns the investigation process, the detection and accreditation of the felony. In this stage, a control judge intervenes. He/she is in charge of invigilating and making sure that due process is carried out. The investigation stage is crucial for the process, for it is when the Public Prosecutor’s office along with the crime experts, policemen and witnesses put together the investigation file and the job of control judges is to ensure that the investigation abides by the regulations. That is to say, making sure that neither impunity nor corruption affects the victim or the accused party. The second and third stages concern the oral trial judges and the execution judges.

This text comes from an investigation carried out in the state of Morelos, Mexico. Throughout the investigation, semi-structured interviews were made to control judges and other operators aiming at observing their perceptions of the new justice model in the country. In order to achieve this analysis, we resorted to coding as a qualitative tool. From this, categories and subcategories of analysis were constructed, which allowed to understand the perspectives and practices that control judges incorporate in the oral accusatory system.