Justice of Punishment as Social Compromise

Abstract

For finding the way of achieving a just punishment we drew up a special questionary containing open question and conducted a survey among 350 federal judges from 20 subjects of the Russian Federation. The survey was conducted in the course of 2017 by forwarding the questionaries to the courts of all regions; in January 2018, we analyzed and summarized the resulted obtained. We selectively studies sentences passed by judges from the same regions and concluded that there are several possible options: 1. Court gave a correct appraisal of the criteria of justice provided by law, though the public does not consider the punishment to be fair. Therefore, social level of justice is unrealized; it may result from deformation in public consciousness as for certain legal processes, although, while imposing punishment a judge must aspire to realize social public will and minimize social opposition as for the penalty imposed; 2. The court gave incorrect appraisal of legal criteria and punishment may not be considered as fair, nevertheless, due to the deformation in public consciousness, the public may still regard such punishment as fair, though it not being the said. 3. Finally, the most favorable situationwhen a sentence is passed in compliance with all legal criteria and successfully undergoes social expertise; in this case, one may say that justice is attained and the punishment is fair.

Role of sociological methodology in determining criteria evaluating justice of punishment in criminal law

“…Let us present some results that follow from the judges' survey [9,10]. The first questions aimed to determine the expert level of judges' perception of what place justice occupies in criminal law.…”