EPISTEMIC TRUTH AND CRIMINAL INVESTIGATION

Abstract

The police inquiry or preliminary investigation aims to clarify the facts, indicate the authorship, materiality and circumstance of a criminal offense, but it is not limited to this. It is also a filter that guarantees the fundamental rights of the investigated and an instrument of protection of the victim. A criminal investigation needs to be epistemologically oriented in order to avoid the abusive character of punitive power, to seek the applicability of the principles established in a democratic state of law and the guarantees guaranteed in various international human rights instruments. The epistemic truth consists in the passage of the use of legal rules to the criteria and instruments used to obtain the factual material on which the decision-making choice rests. It analyzes the rationality applicable to criminal investigation, oriented to the discovery of the facts and their circumstances, as well as their contribution to the reduction of error. From the literature review, it is observed that the evidence and possible errors of investigation can compromise the search for truth. Finally, it is concluded that the fundamental guarantee to the limited and deferred contradictory in the investigation can act with the knowledge of epistemologically oriented facts, that is, a rationally justified knowledge.