scholarly journals The Purpose of Punishment in the Science of Criminal Law

2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 125-139
Author(s):  
A. I. Rarog

Despite a centuries-old debate among scientists from different countries, the question about the purposes of criminal punishment remains relevant. The criminal legislation of the Soviet period was inconsistent in formulating the purposes of punishment and repeatedly changed the list of purposes and their wording, therefore, in the criminal law doctrine there were long and fruitless discussions on this issue. They have not stopped to this day, although the current Criminal Code of the Russian Federation unambiguously proclaimed the purposes of punishment to be the restoration of social justice, the correction of the convicted person and the prevention of new crimes. The discrepancy between the purposes of punishment in the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation and the purposes of the execution of punishment in the Penal Enforcement Code of the Russian Federation to a certain extent interferes with a uniform interpretation of the purposes of criminal punishment. The paper proves the validity and comprehensive nature of the legislative decision and rejects the importance and possibility of legislative adjustment of the purposes of punishment or supplementing their list with the purposes of punishment, expiation, resocialization of the convict, his re-education, etc.

2020 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 324-330
Author(s):  
V.V. Popov ◽  
◽  
S.M. Smolev ◽  

The presented study is devoted to the issues of disclosing the content of the goals of criminal punishment, analyzing the possibilities of their actual achievement in the practical implementation of criminal punishment, determining the political and legal significance of the goals of criminal punishment indicated in the criminal legislation. The purpose of punishment as a definition of criminal legislation was formed relatively recently, despite the fact that theories of criminal punishment and the purposes of its application began to form long before our era. These doctrinal teachings, in essence, boil down to defining two diametrically opposed goals of criminal punishment: retribution and prevention. The state, on the other hand, determines the priority of one or another goal of the punishment assigned for the commission of a crime. The criminal policy of Russia as a whole is focused on mitigating the criminal law impact on the offender. One of the manifestations of this direction is the officially declared humanization of the current criminal legislation of the Russian Federation. However, over the course of several years, the announced “humanization of criminal legislation” has followed the path of amending and supplementing the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation: introducing additional opportunities for exemption from criminal liability and punishment, reducing the limits of punishments specified in the sanctions of articles of the Special Part of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation, and including in the system of criminal punishments of types of measures that do not imply isolation from society. At the same time the goals of criminal punishment are not legally revised, although the need for such a decision has already matured. Based on consideration of the opinions expressed in the scientific literature regarding the essence of those listed in Part 2 of Art. 43 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation, the goals of punishment are determined that each of them is subject to reasonable criticism in view of the abstract description or the impossibility of achieving in the process of law enforcement (criminal and penal) activities. This circumstance gives rise to the need to revise the content of the goals of criminal punishment and to determine one priority goal that meets the needs of modern Russian criminal policy. According to the results of the study the conclusion is substantiated that the only purpose of criminal punishment can be considered to ensure proportionality between the severity of the punishment imposed and the social danger (harmfulness) of the crime committed. This approach to determining the purpose of criminal punishment is fully consistent with the trends of modern criminal policy in Russia, since it does not allow the use of measures, the severity of which, in terms of the amount of deprivation and legal restrictions, clearly exceeds the social danger of the committed act. In addition, it is proportionality, not prevention, that underlies justice – one of the fundamental principles of criminal law.


2021 ◽  
pp. 13-17
Author(s):  
Lev M. Prozumentov ◽  

The restoration of social justice as the goal of criminal punishment has already been in the focus of attention, though the Russian criminal legislation has included it for the first time. The legislator has not defined what is meant by “restoring social justice”, although the term “justice” can be found in Part 1 of Art. 60 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation in Clause 1 of the Resolution of the Plenum of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation of January 11, 2007 “On the practice of imposing criminal punishment by the courts of the Russian Federation”. This circumstance has led to an ambiguous interpretation of the term in research and practice. Some researchers do not distinguish the categories of goal and principle of social justice and consider the goal of restoring social justice through the principle contained in Art. 6 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation, i.e. through the correspondence of punishment to the nature and degree of social danger of the crime. In criminal law, there are other approaches to this goal, which are analyzed in this article. The author concludes about the “utopian” character of this goal and its unattainability in real life.


Author(s):  
Vаleria A. Terentieva ◽  

The systematic nature of criminal law forms the main features of the industry, namely: normativity, universalism, that is, the absence of casuistry and obligation. The strict consistency of both the entire industry and its individual institutions allows avoiding the redundancy of criminal law regulation, clearly determining the legal status of a person in conflict with the law. However, the norms of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation do not always meet these requirements due to defects in legal technology, and, sometimes, gaps in regulation. In practice, the courts, in an effort to minimize the above defects, sometimes resort to excessive criminal law regulation; as an example, the article gives the ratio of the application of suspended sentence and placement in a special educational institution of a closed type. The article analyzes sentences to minors in which Art. 73 and Part 2 of Art. 92 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation were simultaneously applied in one sentence for the same act. For a comprehensive study, the article analyzed sentences to minors held in special educational institutions of a closed type for the period from 2014 to 2020, criminal statistics posted on the website of the Judicial Department of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation, as well as various points of view of leading legal scholars. The research methods of static observation, analysis and synthesis, the system-structural method, as well as a number of factographic methods, were used. The study develops from the general to the specific, i.e., first, systematicity is analyzed as a property of the branch of criminal law and then as a property of a legal institution, namely, the release of minors from criminal liability. Consistency as a property of the institution of exemption from criminal punishment presupposes the impossibility of intersecting elements within one institution. Special attention is paid to the legal nature of suspended sentence as the most common punishment measure for minors, and its effectiveness. Then the cases of the simultaneous application of Art. 73 and Part 2 of Art. 92 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation are analyzed. In the course of the study, the author examines the features of suspended sentence and placement in a special educational and educational institution of a closed type, compares these two forms of criminal liability, and highlights the differences. The conclusion is that the simultaneous placement in a special educational institution of a closed type and suspended sentence are a redundancy of criminal law regulation. The article raises the question of the need to improve the Criminal Code in terms of the development of placement in a special educational and educational institution of a closed type as a type of exemption from criminal punishment: the court is to be provided with the opportunity to control the juvenile offender’s correctional process.


Author(s):  
V.I. Tikhonov

The Institute of mitigating and aggravating circumstances is presented not only in the norms of the General part of the criminal legislation of the Russian Federation. The application of these circumstances in the construction of individual elements of a crime allows the legislator to differentiate the orientation of the criminal law influence in relation to a specific crime element or in qualifying the fact of life reality. In law enforcement practice, proving the subjective side of a crime often causes significant problems. At the same time, motivation and achievement of a specific goal of committing a crime can have both a mitigating and an aggravating effect. The subjective side has a significant impact not only on the design of the offenses of the Special Part of the Criminal Law, but also on the process of sentencing through legal regulation of circumstances mitigating or aggravating criminal punishment. In this regard, both general and mandatory features of the subject of the crime also affect the procedure for establishing guilt and determining punishment in accordance with the norms of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation. Of scientific interest is the study of the influence of the process of legal regulation of mitigating and aggravating circumstances in terms of the impact on this process of subjective signs of criminal behavior.


Author(s):  
М.Ф. Гареев

В статье рассматривается и обосновывается необходимость возобновления в уголовном праве института конфискации имущества в качестве уголовного наказания. Необходимость его возобновления обусловлена наличием ряда преступных деяний, представляющих угрозу обществу, государству, национальной безопасности Российской Федерации. В настоящее время законодательная регламентация конфискации имущества в качестве иной меры уголовноправового характера, вызванная неопределенностью его сущности, целевых установок и механизма назначения, не выполняет предупредительную задачу, установленную уголовным законодательством. The article discusses and substantiates the need to renew the institution of confiscation of property in criminal law as a criminal punishment. The need to resume it is due to the presence of a number of criminal acts that pose a threat to society, the state, and the national security of the Russian Federation. Currently, the legislative regulation of the confiscation of property as another measure of a criminal-legal nature, caused by the uncertainty of its essence, targets and the mechanism of appointment, does not fulfill the preventive task established by the criminal legislation.


Author(s):  
Michail Sagandykov ◽  
Galia Shafikova

The relevance of the study is based, on the one hand, on high public danger of crimes in the sphere of labor relations and, on the other hand, on a very low interest of law enforcement, control and supervision bodies in these crimes. The authors show that modern criminal legislation in the sphere of protecting labor rights has a high potential in comparison with both Soviet and foreign criminal law norms. At the same time, this potential, primarily expressed in Chapter 19 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation, remains untapped. Many norms, including Art. 136 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation «Violating the Equality of Rights and Freedoms of Man and Citizen», are virtually never used against discrimination in the labor sphere, although such discrimination is quite common. No such cases have been found in court statistical data, thus it is impossible to provide a comprehensive criminological description of these crimes. The norm of Art. 136 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation is seldom used by law enforcers because it is legally ambiguous. In this connection the authors suggest complementing the disposition of Art. 136 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation with such factors of discrimination as «age» and «marital status». The latter factor will make it possible to provide extra protection to pregnant women and women with children under three years old against unmotivated refusal of employment and firing. The authors argue that such actions of the employer should constitute an aggregate of crimes and should be punished simultaneously under Art. 136 and 145 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation. At the same time, the authors think that it is not appropriate to make the disposition of Art. 136 a blanket one due to vague grounds for discrimination in special legislation, including labor legislation. The obtained results could be used for the improvement of Russian legislation based on theoretical research and the practice of law enforcement.


Author(s):  
E.R. Gafurova

This article examines the features of the Russian criminal law norm that provides for liability for the murder of a newborn child by a mother. We analyzed the data of the Judicial Department on the statistics of convicts for 2016 and 2019 under Article 106 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation in relation to the indicators of other privileged elements of murder, indicating the latency of this type of crime. The article also examines some features of the legislative structure of Article 106 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation, accompanied by examples of judicial practice. The article examines the criminal law norms providing for responsibility for infanticide, the legislation of Italy, Austria, Switzerland, Holland and Denmark, and highlights the distinctive features of Article 106 of the Russian criminal legislation. The article presents proposals for possible improvement of the norms of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation on responsibility for the murder of a newborn child by a mother, confirmed by the indicators of a sociological study.


2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Vadim Zamaraev

The article considers and analyzes some gaps in the legislative interpretation of Article 291.1 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation. It examines the objective aspect of the crime, and also presents the problems of prosecuting for mediation in bribery according to the specifics of the qualification of this socially dangerous act. The author substantiates the grounds and limits of criminal liability for mediation in bribery, taking into account the act of committing various forms of this crime. On the basis of a comprehensive analysis of criminal legislation and scientific works of not only Russian scientists, but also foreign experts in the field of criminal law, the main prospects for the development and solution of the above mentioned problematic issues related to gaps in the legislative interpretation of Article 291.1 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation are proposed. Special attention is also paid to certain issues of qualification of the investigated act, which directly depend on the amount of the bribe. As a result of the study, it is recommended to introduce some changes and additions to Parts 1 and 5 of Article 291.1 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation.


Author(s):  
Andrei Nikulenko ◽  
Maksim Smirnov

The article is devoted to the necessary defense as a circumstance that precludes the criminality of an act in the criminal legislation of the Russian Federation. The significance and importance of the existence of this norm is proclaimed both in the criminal law and in the Basic law of the state – the Constitution of the Russian Federation. The existence of a rule on necessary defense in the state emphasizes the development of its legal system, allowing citizens to defend their own interests and protect the interests of others, in ways not prohibited by law, thereby preventing exceeding the limits of necessary defense. A number of issues related to the application of the norms provided for in article 37 of the Criminal code of Russia, as well as the norms of the Special part of the Criminal code of Russia, which provide for liability for crimes committed when exceeding the limits of necessary defense, were raised. The study of the relevant norms makes it possible to identify the advantages and disadvantages of legal regulation of circumstances that exclude the criminality of an act, including the shortcomings of judicial and investigative practice. The author criticizes the existing approach and suggests ways to resolve these problems, including by correcting the resolution of the Plenum of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation dated September 27, 2012, № 19 «About application by courts of legislation on necessary defense and causing harm when detaining a person who has committed a crime». Because of the ambiguous and often inconsistent application of norms of the criminal legislation on necessary defense, the authors give the recommendations (in further reconstruction of the relevant provisions of article 37 of the Criminal Code) to use an enumeration approach of presenting the legal formulation of these rules that allow the defender to cause any harm to an attacker. At the same time, it creates the most understandable, for citizens, formulation of the norm that allows lawfully causing harm to public relations protected by criminal law.


Author(s):  
Andrey V. Arkhipov ◽  
◽  

The article examines the history of the emergence and development of Russian legislation on criminal liability for fraud. It is noted that for the first time fraud is mentioned in the legal acts of the second half of the 16th century - the Codes of Justice of Tsars Ivan IV and Fyodor Ioannovich. Initially, fraud was most often understood as a deft but petty theft, in which de-ception was used to facilitate its commission. The understanding of fraud as the theft of other people's property, committed by deception, began to be formed only in the second half of the 18th century with the publication on April 3, 1781 by Empress Catherine II of the Decree "On the court and punishments for theft of different kinds and the establishment of working houses in all the gubernias." In the 19th century, the clarifying process of the content of the term "fraud" continued. It was reflected in the first codified criminal laws of the Russian Empire - Code of crimi-nal and corrective penalties of Russia of 1845 and the Charter on Punishments imposed by the justices of the peace of 1864. A significant contribution to the development of the Russian criminal law on liability for fraud was made by a group of legal scholars involved in the de-velopment of the Criminal Code of the Russian Empire, in which the whole Chapter 33 (Arti-cles 591-598) contained the rules on liability for fraud. Although the 1903 Criminal Code was not fully enacted, it had a significant impact on the formation of criminal law on liability for fraud in subsequent regulations. During the Soviet period, the legislation on the responsibility for fraud continued to develop. For the first time, abuse of trust was mentioned as a method of crime, along with deception. After the collapse of the Soviet Union and the adoption in 1993 of the Constitution of the Russian Federation, the Federal Law 10 of 01.07.1994 made signifi-cant changes to the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation of 1960 that served as the basis for the system of crimes against property in modern Russia.


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