6 penalty, the severity should be linked to the intrinsic gravity of the crime. It is not the seriousness of the punishment that determines the seriousness of the crime, but it is the latter which justifies the former. In sum, it is necessary to place the terms of the issue in their proper order: in particular, in the order that most benefits the protection of human rights. In this sense, it is necessary to read beyond the criminal code to understand which forms of illicit behaviour may be classified as the most serious, so that when transferred to the criminal code, they merit the highest penalty provided for in law. 9. The modern criminal regime, rooted in democracy and in the idea of the State as guarantor, impedes the protection of the most valuable interests from attack or from even greater dangers. The judicially protected interest of the highest rank is human life, and murder - deprivation of the life of another - its most powerful form of attack. The American Convention not only refers to "serious crimes" - of which murder certainly forms part - but to the "most serious crimes", that is, those crimes to be found at the tip of the pyramid, those which deserve the most severe reproach, those that affect in the most grave way individual and social interests, in sum, those that because of their unsurpassable gravity are able to carry an equally unsurpassable punishment: capital punishment. This leads one to question, whether it is possible that some alleged murders are more serious than others, not as a function of the result of this type of criminal behaviour - which is the same in every case: deprivation of life - but rather in virtue of the behaviour entailing specific characteristics or because persons with a certain condition may be predisposed it. The idea in sum would be to establish a gradation in the gravity of facts that might at first glance appear identical. 10. A non-evolved criminal system could sanction diverse conduct with the same penalty. It would indiscriminately administer the most severe punishments as a response to illicit acts of varying depravity. Instead, a developed system identifies with greater precision - a precaution which provides in essence an individual and societal guarantee - the diverse extremes of illicit conduct meriting criminal sanction and adapting the punishment, as much as possible, to the individual circumstances of the crime and the offender who carries it out. This is accomplished through two channels recently opened in modern criminal law: a) the organization of diverse and specific categories of crime designed to differentiate criminal behaviour based on specific characteristics rather than by its consequences, with a corresponding view to imposing different kinds of punishment; and b) giving the trier of fact the authority to individualize the sentence in conformity with information of the offence and the offender tendered, certified and valued in the process, within the parameters - maximum and minimum - of punishment that corresponds to the crime. 11. Murder always entails the deprivation of human life, however not all murder theories are equivalent, nor is the culpability of its authors. In fact, the taking of a life is often carried out or manifested in diverse ways, which fall into different categories of severity. This then leads to the creation of varied categories of crimes that correspondingly describe acts of varying degrees of gravity. In light of the above, the intentional deprivation of life (intentional homicide) does not fall into a single category of crime, instead it extends over various categories, associated with different levels of punishment. There exists one basic category of homicide and a diverse set of complementary categories which