The Absence of Body in Cyberspace - Criminal Justice Impact
The Absence of Body in Cyberspace - Criminal Justice Impact

Summary/Abstract: The "computer ontology" has an impact on constructing the offenders’ and victims’ identities and it also shapes the image of a judge. The present paper focuses on body as one of the central ideas in criminal law. In cyberspace, the body extends outward into data: digitized identity cards, sentencing information systems, risk assessment instruments, etc. Some authors talk about the disappearance of body-inlaw (Redhead), others about the expansion of data/body (Brown). The impact of the so-called "computer ontology" can be observed in police investigation, prosecution, judging and sentencing. In criminal investigation, "evidence" is rendered into a data-human form. The nature of victimization, as seen from the victim’s perspective, is challenged: which type of victimization should be perceived as the "real" one? On the other hand, the notion of a criminal offender is conceived through the optic of pre-defined "risk factors" and other pre-defined attributes recognized by the criminal legal system. In systems with sentencing information instruments, a judge has to take into consideration only the factors that have been previously anticipated, estimated as relevant and adequately pondered. Franko Aas believes that "a delinquent with a soul" has already ceased to exist and instead suggests denoting a subject as a "data-vidual". A subject – an offender is thus no longer perceived as a contextualized multi-dimensional entity, but as a decontextualized two-dimensional abstract object. From cybercrime perspective, the paper tackles one of the central presumptions of criminal law and criminology, i.e. the presumption of a generic offender.

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