Problems of Systemic Penalization (Using the Example of Differentiating Criminal Liability for Crimes with Many-Object Corpus Delicti)

Abstract

The author examines the issues of differentiating criminal liability in connection with an additional object in corpus delicti. It is shown that each modern criminal law has its own penological system, i.e. an interconnected system of sanctions in the Special Part of criminal law and the criminal law institutes of punishments, other criminal law measures, the exemption from criminal liability and from punishment. When constructing the sanctions of some criminal law norm, the lawmaker should keep it in mind that this is an element of the criminal law’s penological system, and that its introduction or change will have an impact on the system as a whole. Besides, it is necessary to observe the methodological principle of systemic balance, which presupposes the mutual relativity of the strictness of sanctions and the influence which the institutes of punishment, other criminal law measures, the exemption from criminal liability and from punishment have on the actual strictness of criminal liability. The author demonstrates the principle of systemic balance using the example of penalizing multi-object crimes with aggravating circumstances. Special attention is paid to the methodology that would be appropriate for the assessment of the systemic character of multi-object crimes. Besides, it is recommended to use such numeric parameters as the median of punishment, the increase coefficient of the median of punishment and the increase coefficient for criminal liability. The author uses special methodology to calculate the increase coefficients for criminal liability in all the cases of differentiating liability based on the features that determine the multi-object character of crime. The method of mathematical statistics is used to analyze the obtained coefficients: to determine the scope of their variation for crimes with a single attribute, and to calculate the range, arithmetic mean, median and mode of the values in the number series of coefficients for each of the attributes. The author concludes that a cross-cutting analysis of liability’s differentiation without taking into account the homogeneity of key corpus delicti of crimes makes it possible to state, with a certain margin of error, the existing public assessment of the degree of public danger of each of the aggravating attributes that determine the multi-object character of crime; to identify the cases of gross violations of the systemic principle for the differentiation of liability in the current legislation; to model the approximate guidelines for differentiating liability when criminal law norms are changed or a new criminal law is adopted. Scaling the coefficients for raising the level of criminal liability and studying their dynamics could be used as one of the methods for monitoring the criminal law policy of the Russian Federation.