The age of the juvenile offender as a basis for a presumption of legal possibility of incurring criminal liability in the light of the draft amendment to the Criminal Code of 2019

Abstract

The Amending Act of the Penal Code of 2019 introduces legislative modifications, including in the scope of rules functioning in the area of criminal law of juvenile offenders for the crimes they committed. These changes were directed at increasing the repressiveness of actions against juvenile offenders, which is manifested in the introduction of an obligatory additional criminal law and a relatively mandatory premise to apply criminal liability in relation to the aforementioned group of perpetrators, which significantly limits the possibility of implementing the principle of accurate criminal law response in cases where the use of criminal law as an ultima ratio seems inadvisable. The indicated relationship is presented in the article through the prism of the theoretical and legal construction of the presumption of law, which combines facts related to the age of the perpetrator with the alleged facts of the culpability, and as a consequence the ability to incur criminal liability on the principles provided for in the code, at the expense of e.g. liability regulated in the Act on proceedings in juvenile rights. The author postulates that this relationship should be reversed, which appears as a legislative challenge that can significantly reduce the level of repressiveness of regulations contained in the Amending Act.