Does a criminal conviction automatically mean the accused has to pay the victim?

One sentence, and it does a great deal of work

Art. 100 is as short as a provision gets: every person criminally liable for a felony is also civilly liable. There is no condition attached and no separate act the victim must perform to bring the civil obligation into being. Liability to the injured party arises from the felony itself, alongside the penalty. This is why the criminal court, in the same judgment that convicts, ordinarily also fixes what is owed to the offended party, instead of leaving that person to begin an entirely fresh case afterwards.

What is automatic is the liability, not the amount

The provision settles that something is owed; it does not say how much. The heads of recovery are set out further on in the Code, and the figure under each of them has to be established, not assumed. Where property was taken, the starting point is returning it. Where it cannot be returned or was damaged, the court determines the value. Losses that followed from the crime have to be shown with whatever proof exists — receipts, records of earnings lost, medical documents. A conviction is the door to those claims rather than a substitute for proving them.

The situations where it does not follow so directly

There are qualifications a victim should know about before assuming the judgment will contain a money award. The civil aspect can be dealt with separately if the offended party has waived it, has reserved the right to bring it in its own action, or had already filed that action before the criminal case began. And the reverse case matters too: an acquittal does not always end the civil claim, because a court may acquit on the ground that guilt was not proved beyond reasonable doubt while still finding the accused answerable civilly on the lower standard that applies there.

What to do with this if you are the injured party

Bring the proof of loss into the criminal case rather than saving it. What you can recover is limited in practice by what is on the record when the court decides, so the receipts, valuations, medical bills and proof of income should be with your counsel early and in order of date. If you have not been asked for any of that, ask why. And do not assume a paper award ends the matter: collecting on it is a separate exercise, and what the accused actually owns is worth knowing about before the judgment rather than after.

Related provisions

• Revised Penal Code, Article 100 — Criminal Liability Means Civil Liability
• Revised Penal Code, Article 104 — What Civil Liability Includes