Social Danger of the Crime: Constitutional Law and Criminal Law Analysis

In the Russian legal system, the crime, unlike other wrongs, is characterized as the act that has specific, namely criminal, public danger. Criminal liability in contrast to administrative liability is established for cases of high public danger. Turning to the meaningful characteristic of the phenomenon of public danger, the Russian doctrine proposed a number of theoretical constructions that in modern conditions, taking into account the need for updating the methodological framework of criminal law, can and should be reinterpreted and, to some extent, rediscovered.

Parameters of the “criminal” danger are not originally determined; they do not have clear evidence and criteria, and in modern conditions they cannot be calculated mathematically accurately. It is hardly possible to determine empirically the minimum threshold at which “crime begins”, since this task is political rather than experimental and cognitive, and it is resolved in the course of implementing the criminal policy of the State. Being a characteristic of all offenses, public danger has special quantitative parameters allowing us to assert specific criminal public danger that can be presented as a generalized indicator of the risk of a wrongful act, its actual or projected consequences and the identity of the perpetrator. The danger of a wrongful act serves as a starting point in assessing the risk of the crime at the lawmaking and law enforcement levels, assessing the risk of the wrong and of the crime that represent mismatched assessment practices. The risk created by the wrong depends on the balance between two significant factors: (a) the content and hierarchy of constitutional values at which the wrongful act is directed to cause harm; (b) characteristics of the threat emanating from the wrongful act that must be real, valid and must be confirmed by the specific actions or omissions of the wrongdoer.

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