Investigating the Influence of the Heat of Passion Type on Qualification of the Act, the Type and Scope of Imposed Punishment

Abstract

Introduction. Commission of any crime involves intense emotional experience and emotional outbursts. And this kind of agitation is felt not only by a person encroached upon, but also by a subject of a crime. In the majority of cases, emotional experience is related to committing the certain actions resulting in violation of the Criminal Law and, consequently, committing a crime. However, in some cases, the mechanism of a crime is realised after and as a result of experiencing the powerful emotional experience. In such cases, it is impossible to deny the possibility of this state to have impact not only on the intentions and motives of a person, but also on the nature of his actions and their outcome. From this perspective, studying the features of the heat of passion is of great importance for the Criminal Law and for assessing the nature of a guilty person’s actions, as well as for determining the appropriate punitive reaction by means of the term and type of criminal punishment. The present study aims at differentiating the influence of various types of heat of passion, experienced by a subject of a crime, on the important elements of a crime, which are taken into consideration while qualifying the act and imposing the punishment.Materials and Methods. In order to define the concept of heat of passion, it is necessary to analyse available scientific approaches used for investigating this problem and correlate the problem with the existing practices of studying the heat of passion. Besides, not only the most popular opinions of practitioners and theoreticians have been taken into account, but the unpopular opinions on the issue of the heat of passion detection have been analysed as well. The general and specific scientific methods have been used in the research, in particular, the analysis, synthesis, interpolation, structural analysis, methods of legal psychology and psychiatry.Results. The "heat of passion" concept has a complex and heterogeneous nature, therefore, in order to be able to assess impartially the criminal and legal value of a person's state upon committing a crime, it is necessary not to be restricted to merely establishing the fact of heat of passion presence at the moment of committing a crime. It is important to identify, to which of five types of heat of passion, stipulated in the present work, and to which of their phase, the state, diagnosed in a subject of a crime, can be referred to.Discussion and Conclusions. As a result of conducted research, it was possible to identify such types of heat of passion as: the cumulative, the abnormal, the one caused by alcoholic intoxication, the pathological, the physiological, which, in their turn, undergo several phases during formation and experiencing by a subject. However, the majority of the researchers share the opinion that only two of the identified types of heat of passion can unambiguously entail criminal and legal consequences: physiological (not related to the diseased condition and liable to imposing and enforcement of criminal punishment) and pathological heat of passion (entailing, if present, declaring a person insane). All the other heat of passion states, which to one degree or another are varieties of the two above-mentioned, can not exclude imposing and enforcement of criminal punishment, but may affect the substantive characteristics of the subjective side of a crime, and, consequently, the type and scope of the punishment imposed.