Structural analysis of corpus of the lawful infliction of harm to the environment under circumstances precluding criminality

Abstract

One of the institutions of criminal law, which is of undoubted interest among forensic scientists, are the circumstances precluding the criminality of an act. This interest is due to the controversy of certain legislative provisions, entailing the prosecution of persons acting under the conditions of the legality of these circumstances. When characterizing the circumstances precluding the criminality of an act, included in Ch. 8 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation, the law enforcement officer always proceeds from the assessment of the harm already caused to the interests protected by law and on the compliance of the harm with the conditions enshrined in the law. Acts committed in a state of circumstances precluding criminality are legally significant, since the law associates the emergence of two types of legal relations with these circumstances. In the first case, circumstances change the criminal-legal nature of the act and transfer it to the category of unpunished, despite causing harm. In the second, in the presence of circumstances in conditions of violation of the legality of an action (inaction), the harm caused is qualified as a crime. This necessitates a criminal-legal assessment of the harm caused from the standpoint of the theory of corpus delicti. At the same time, the substantiation of the legality of the actions of a person under the conditions of the circumstances precluding the criminality of an act is established by identifying in his action the signs of the corpus of lawful infliction of harm. The need for a structural analysis of the composition of the lawful infliction of harm is primarily due to the need to distinguish between certain types of circumstances that exclude crime, in order to correctly qualify the committed acts and prevent unjustified criminal prosecution for its infliction. The corpus of the lawful infliction of harm should be considered by highlighting the objective and subjective signs of the circumstances precluding the criminality of an act by analyzing the object, objective side, subject and subjective side of an act.