On the Need and Possible Options for Changing the Rules for Determining Forms of Guilt

The current version of part 2 of article 24 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation, which appeared because of changes made to the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation in 1998, is rightly criticized for uncertainty. In the literature, various proposals are made to change the rules for determining the forms of guilt. The existing regulation needs adjusting, since it does not ensure the achievement of the initial goal of improving law enforcement, which was originally intended in part 2 of article 24, and does not comply with the principles of equality and legal certainty. The need to ensure compliance with these principles and achieve the original goal of the rule under consideration requires rejecting proposals to "legalize" the discretion of the law enforcement officer, the possibility of which arose due to the uncertainty of the current version of part 2 of article 24. Due to this uncertainty, compliance with the provisions of the Special part will not solve the existing problems. Unifying negligent crimes into a separate chapter, dividing the crimes in the existing chapters by paragraphs, depending on the form of guilt, is too difficult a way if we are talking about improving the current Criminal Code of the Russian Federation. Clear automatic consolidation of the possibility of both forms of guilt does not provide the required differentiation of punishment.

Restoring the original version of part 2 of article 24 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation is an acceptable and easiest way, but there is a reason to believe that the rule changed in this way will fail to ensure that the law enforcement officer follows it. The inclusion of a form of guilt clause in the description of each body of a crime might be an effective means of limiting the discretion of the law enforcement officer, but this method is difficult to implement. It combines the features of these two methods of fixing the rule in the form of a list of crimes involving a particular form of guilt, by analogy with how the age at which criminal responsibility begins is now established.

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