The possibility of taking into account the perpetrator’s repentance of a committed crime as a circumstance mitigating the punishment

Abstract

Introduction: Through the study of 500 convictions handed down by various courts of first instance from 2016 to 2020, the author found that the mitigating circumstance “repentance for the deed”, applied by the courts on the basis of Part 2 of Art. 61 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation is taken into account more often than those indicated in the list of Part 1 of Art. 61 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation. In this regard, the article analyzes the history of occurrence of the considered mitigating circumstance in the regulatory legal acts of the pre-revolutionary and Soviet periods, raises the question of the possibility of its inclusion in the list of Part 1 of Art. 61 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation, as well as of the establishment of criteria for the application of this mitigating circumstance.
 Research methods: The article is based on general scientific (analysis, synthesis and formal-logical) and special (formal-legal, historical, statistical, questionnaire method) research methods.
 Research results: The author of the article comes to the conclusion that the mitigating circumstance «repentance for the deed» should be taken into account by the courts in cases where the perpetrator confirmed his repentance by positive post-criminal behavior, and only when he had not previously committed similar crimes (had not been convicted or released due to non-rehabilitating circumstances from criminal liability). In this case, there is no need to include this mitigating circumstance in the list of Part 1 of Art. 61 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation.