Types of a Legal Mistake Excluding Criminal Responsibility

Abstract

The article deals with the problems of identification of such types of the legal mistake that exclude criminal liability. With regard to the legal regulation and on the basis of the provisions of the criminal law doctrine, the author gives his own classification of the legal mistake and substantiates the necessity of recognition of its legal significance. The author comes to the conclusion that the variety of legal mistakes should be systematized on the basis of two criteria each of which implies two variants of manifestation. They include the cause of the mistake (either a defect of lawmaking or a defect of perception of established normative requirements), as well as the nature of the mistake (either ignorance of the fact of existence of criminal law prohibition or ignorance of its content). Within the framework of a comprehensive classification based on various combinations of the criteria under consideration, four types of the legal mistake that exclude criminal responsibility are distinguished: 1) a mistake caused by a defect in lawmaking and related to the ignorance of the existence of the criminal law prohibition; 2) a mistake caused by a defect in lawmaking and associated with the ignorance of the content of the criminal law prohibition; 3) a mistake caused by a defect in perception of established normative requirements by a person and related to the ignorance of the fact of existence of the criminal law prohibition; 4) a mistake caused by a defect perception by the person of established regulatory requirements and associated with the ignorance of the content of the criminal law prohibition. The article deals with the problems of presumption of knowledge of the law and awareness of wrongfulness of the act with due regard to intersectoral links existing in criminal law. The author refers to the legal stance of the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation, the European Court of Human Rights, the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation and relies in his conclusions on the examples from case law and jurisprudence, and makes references to foreign experience.