Public prosecutor Edwin Cuello has argued that legal frameworks must adapt their interpretations and statutory rules to tackle evolving forms of physical and digital crime effectively.
Writing in an analysis published in Santo Domingo on August 18, 2026, Cuello cited recent legal reforms in the Dominican Republic as evidence of how criminal statutes can evolve without violating constitutional guarantees.
Cuello explained that classic criminal law was historically built on what he termed an illusion of fixedness. Under this traditional view, criminal offense types were treated as unchangeable statutory photographs designed to protect the principle of strict legality.
In legal doctrine, the principle of strict legality ensures that no person can be prosecuted for an act unless it was explicitly defined as a crime by statute prior to the conduct. Cuello argued that while this principle remains crucial, static legal molds fail to keep pace with changing social realities.
The Invariant Core of Criminal Offense Definitions
According to Cuello, cognitive legal analysis reveals that criminal norms possess an adaptive underlying layer. He stated that while the structural and protective core of an offense stays unchanged, its semantic periphery must remain flexible to penalize new types of social harm.
Drawing on cognitive linguistics applied to law, Cuello noted that judges, prosecutors, and citizens do not store legal definitions as literal dictionary entries. Instead, the brain processes offenses like theft, fraud, or property violation as conceptual mental frames.
These conceptual frameworks immediately activate mental pathways that evaluate the wrongfulness of an action, criminal intent, and the disruption of public order. Cuello emphasized that this neuro-semantic core reflects permanent human concepts of justice and community cohesion that do not alter over time.
Contextual Expansion in the Digital Age
Cuello warned that absolute semantic rigidity would make criminal law obsolete, leading to widespread impunity. He explained that adaptive legal interpretation allows statutes to expand their reach without altering their original statutory text.
He underscored that this process is distinct from analogy in bad part, a practice strictly prohibited under penal protections to prevent prosecutors from inventing new crimes. Instead, Cuello described the process as an evolutionary subsumption that broadens what a statutory term refers to as society changes.
To illustrate this point, Cuello highlighted traditional offenses such as home invasion and property violation, which historically required physical lock breaking or the physical occupation of real estate. In the Caribbean nation of the Dominican Republic, public prosecutors serve as state attorneys tasked with investigating crimes and upholding public order.
Cuello pointed out that technological changes now force legal operators to shift their focus from physical spaces to digital environments. He stated that unauthorized intrusion into computer systems, personal data clouds, or virtual platforms containing sensitive private information harms the exact same legal right to privacy and exclusive domain. In these scenarios, the underlying offense structure remains intact while context expands its scope.
Legislative Reconfiguration and Modern Harm
When legal interpretation alone cannot bridge the gap created by rapid technological growth and sophisticated criminal methods, Cuello stated that legislative updates become necessary. He observed that statutory creation is not a static historical event, but an ongoing process driven by social changes.
Cuello explained that formal statutory updates serve a homeostatic function, readjusting penalty limits to preserve the ultimate purpose of criminal law, which is the effective protection of rights. He noted that lawmakers may alter penalty formulas or statutory action verbs, but the fundamental evaluation of an act's wrongfulness remains unchanged.
Without these legislative adjustments, Cuello argued that material justice risks becoming a dead letter or purely symbolic law that fails to protect citizens.
Sentence Stacking in Dominican Penal Reform
As a concrete example of statutory adaptation, Cuello highlighted the recent evolution of punitive rules in the Dominican Republic. He pointed to the country's move away from the 19th-century absorption principle, where the single heaviest penalty absorbed all lighter sentences.
Cuello wrote that the absorption rule was designed for simpler societies with lower levels of complex crime. Under that older system, offenders who committed multiple distinct crimes effectively received no additional punishment for secondary offenses, creating what Cuello described as public cognitive dissonance over unpunished harm.
To address this issue, Dominican lawmakers instituted the material accumulation of penalties for multiple serious crimes committed together. Cuello cited Articles 46, 47, and 48 of the Dominican Penal Code, enacted under Law 44-26, which establish the summation of sentences when multiple offenses occur.
Cuello stressed that lawmakers did not invent a new criminal law system, but readapted existing punitive structures to match the true severity of modern criminal acts. He concluded that adapting legal frameworks is essential for maintaining legal certainty, invoking the principle that truth ultimately prevails.
