The subjective side of a crime in Criminal Law

The subjective side of a crime in criminal law is a category that characterizes the attitude of the offender to the crime he has committed.
It is on this element that in most cases the degree of punishment of a citizen for breaking the law depends. Since crimes with the same outcome can be the result of different goals, motives, actions, the guilt of the offender cannot be determined in the same way. A driver can hit a pedestrian intentionally, with the goal of causing harm to that particular person. The accident may be the result of the pedestrian’s own negligence, when the person driving did not intend to cause injury to him. The result in both cases will be injury. However, it is logical that drivers cannot be convicted equally.

Multi-channel free hotline Legal advice on criminal law. Every day from 9.00 to 21.00

Moscow and region: +7 (495) 662-44-36

St. Petersburg: +7 (812) 449-43-40

Why is it important to determine the subjective component of a crime?

Every person's life is filled with actions. As a rule, any action is performed for some purpose, to achieve which everyone uses the means and method chosen by him. Even inaction has its own purpose.

At the same time, a person who has achieved some results tends to experience certain emotions:

reluctance;
indifference to him;
feeling of satisfaction;
the joy of completing a task;
distress due to the occurrence of a specific outcome.

The subject experiences the same feelings when he commits an unlawful act. This is the subjective component of actions. In criminal law, it is necessarily separated from the objective side, from the very fact of carrying out an illegal action.

When determining the punishment, it is necessary to find out the attitude of the violator of the legal norm to its result, namely:

What were the motives for the act?
What goal was the accused person trying to achieve?

Only then, with the greatest possible reliability, is the subject’s guilt or innocence determined and the appropriate punishment imposed.
Article 14 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation states that only an action that poses a danger to society and is committed guilty is considered a crime. Consequently, criminal liability is possible only when the presence of guilt is proven. Determining what the subjective side of a crime looks like in the criminal law of Russian legislation is a mandatory task.

She is the one:

distinguishes a criminal action from a non-criminal one;
capable of qualifying a crime under a specific article.

The second function of the subjective side in Russian and international law is explained by the fact that crimes that are similar in their objective composition may differ in their subjective characteristics.

Solving such a problem is not easy. This is due to the fact that we are talking about the mental component of human actions. That is, it is necessary to find out what reasons were guided by the subject who committed the crime, what he felt. And you can only guess about feelings by actions.

Terminology

It should be noted that there is no such definition as “subjective side” in the legislation. However, it is revealed through the use of a number of terms. Let's consider what the subjective side includes:

Motive of the crime. It represents the impulse that provokes the determination to commit an offense.
Purpose of the crime. It reflects a person’s idea of the desired result that he strives for by breaking the law.
Guilt. It expresses a person’s mental attitude towards his own act, which poses a danger to society (action or inaction) and entails consequences.

Ignoring any sign of the subjective side can lead to objective imputation. In other words, an innocent person will be held accountable.

The concept of guilt in criminal law

Guilt is the main criterion that turns an act dangerous for others into a crime.
In criminal law, guilt is understood as the attitude of the offender to the incident, determined by his mental state. This characteristic of guilt is determined by the fact that, when committing an illegal act, a person is aware of its criminal nature, but does not abandon his intentions. He longs for them to come.

In this regard, in criminal law it is customary to distinguish two components of guilt:

area of intelligence;
area of will.

This means awareness or the ability to understand the danger and illegality and the desire or unwillingness of negative consequences.

Depending on how the intellectual and volitional components are intertwined, the legislation considers two forms of guilt:

Intentional guilt.
Guilt as a consequence of negligence.

Charges involving the same outcome but different forms of culpability will have different consequences for the offender.

Intent: essence and types

Article 25 of the Criminal Code states that a crime with intent is an action when the offender realizes the danger of his act to society.

Inaction that leads to negative results is also considered a crime. The intellectual component here is the subject’s clear awareness of the criminal nature of his behavior.

In this case, the offender wants or does not want negative results to occur.

Taking into account the volitional component, intention is usually divided into:

straight;
indirect.

In the first situation, the subject, understanding the possibility of criminal consequences, consciously strives for their occurrence. An example of such behavior would be the planned murder of a person in order to take possession of his personal belongings.

The second option assumes that the criminal admits the possibility of socially dangerous consequences, but does not consciously desire them or is indifferent to them. For example, trying to steal other people's things, a criminal takes them off a drunk person who has fallen asleep in the cold. He assumes that the latter may freeze and get injured or even die, but treats this with indifference.

Legal scholars also distinguish between types of intent depending on the time of their occurrence:

Born a long time ago and deliberate, that is, the criminal purposefully prepared to commit a crime.
Appearing suddenly when the offender commits an offense due to momentary reasons, fear or passion. In this case, his actions were not planned.

Acts of a criminal nature carried out with intent of the first type are more dangerous than violations of the law in the second case.

Crimes due to negligence

Negligence as a category of criminal law is considered in Article 26 of the Criminal Code. This does not mean behavior in which the person does not expect negative consequences to occur or expects to avoid them. This is the intellectual component of negligence.

The volitional side in this case is characterized by the subject’s unambiguous reluctance to cause harm to anyone.

The legislator considers two types of such acts:

carelessness as frivolity;
carelessness as negligence.

In the first situation, the person understands perfectly well that his actions can bring negative consequences, but does not strive for them and hopes to avoid them.

The legislator distinguishes careless frivolity from indirect intent. With it, the subject looks indifferently at the possible danger of his actions for others. He does not take any measures to prevent the danger. With frivolity, the subject tries as much as possible to avoid negativity at the moment when a dangerous situation arises. He tries to reduce the risk of consequences.

The most common examples of frivolous crimes involve violating the rules of driving on the road in a car. The driver is transporting a child who is not wearing seat belts, hoping that his skill will allow him to avoid an accident. However, an unforeseen situation is always possible. Of course, the driver took all measures to ensure that the baby did not get hurt. But the minor was still injured.

Negligence is understood as such criminal behavior when the subject does not want negative consequences and does not foresee them, although if he had been more careful, they could have been avoided. The mother leaves the child sleeping in the stroller unattended. He wakes up, gets up and falls to the floor, receiving serious injuries. Another example is when a nurse, without reading the instructions, administers the drug not by drip, but by stream. As a result, the patient’s health was harmed or his death occurred.

The fact that a person underestimated the possibility of a dangerous consequence of his action or inaction is not always blamed. It is impossible to foresee everything.

Therefore, a charge of negligence under the Criminal Code is only possible if the person:

should have foreseen the danger;
and at the same time could predict it.

Otherwise, no punishment is applied to the subject.

It should also be noted that negligence is not always considered in criminal law as guilt, but only when the Criminal Code talks about it in its Special Part.

When intent and negligence are considered together

Many situations in life are unpredictable. The consequences of actions taken are not always possible to calculate with maximum accuracy. Such moments can also be observed in criminal law.

A criminal, having decided to commit a crime, thinks through his actions and expects a certain result. He knows that this is illegal, but he deliberately breaks the law. At the same time, he can understand that his actions can lead to very serious consequences. But the subject hopes that such consequences will not occur, that he will be able to prevent them. However, they still come.

In this case, they speak of double or complex guilt.

As a result, the criminal will have two forms of guilt as part of his crime:

intentional commission of an offense;
violation of legal norms through negligence.

As a rule, the consequences of the crime will be grave or especially grave. It is important that there is a “cause-effect” connection between the crime committed and the resulting harm.

The legislator has established that in this case the crime is considered as intentional.

An example would be a situation where the subject's goal would be to inflict bodily harm on an enemy. It can be assumed that such actions can lead to the death of a person. However, the criminal hopes that he will avoid such an outcome. But after the beating, the death of the victim occurs.

This is a crime with double guilt. It cannot be classified as premeditated murder, since the subject did not have such a goal. But this is not negligence, since criminal intent was present.

When is someone found innocent?

The Criminal Code clearly states that a person cannot be convicted only for a crime committed as a result of his participation, if there was no guilt on his part. The essence of this is that the objective party cannot be sufficient to render a verdict. The main component for a judicial decision should be the subjective side.

Cases where a person did not anticipate the possibility of negative consequences of his actions, could not anticipate them and clearly did not want them to occur, are usually called incidents in the language of criminal law.

There are actually many examples of such situations:

Hitting a pedestrian who ran into the wrong place cannot be considered a crime if the driver was driving in compliance with the traffic rules.
By braking in front of a car that suddenly turned red, the driver did absolutely the right thing, trying to prevent an accident. However, he could not foresee that the cars driving behind him would collide and people would get hurt.
While rescuing a drowning child, the young man could not foresee that his careless movements would lead to harm to the child’s health.

In such cases, criminal punishment is not imposed, since there is no main component of the crime - guilt.

Specification of the definition

The above points of view are to some extent close to the psychological term. In this regard, they can be considered quite general. Since the meaning of the motive and purpose of the crime, ideas about methods of achieving the result in an illegal way or with the possibility of realizing the alleged danger to society and the likelihood of responsibility for the crime (as a rule, a person expects impunity in such cases) are interconnected, the first can be defined as a deliberate desire to illegal action.

In this case, the definition can be further specified. The motive for a crime acts as a conscious impulse that guides a person when breaking the law. In other words, it represents the source of action, the internal driving force of a person, determined by the interests and needs of motivation. This source causes a person to need to break the law. In this case, needs should be considered everything that is necessary for normal life, but that a person does not have. These can be moral, material, intellectual and other values. At their core, the motives for committing a crime make it possible to determine the true nature of the violation. In this case, the illegal action itself acts as an objectification of one or another motivation.

Motivation and goal setting

When it comes to crimes of an intentional nature, there are two more important criteria that must be taken into account by the court when passing a sentence:

a deliberate crime is always committed for something, in other words, the criminal has motives to organize and implement it;
such a crime implies the result that the criminal expects from his actions, that is, the goal.

The close connection between these two categories is obvious.

The motive and the goal may in some cases be almost identical. The expected result in this case acts as a motivating factor for criminal action: “The thief dreams of taking possession of the beautiful ring of his friend. Therefore, he steals, taking the jewel for himself.”

Sometimes motives can be the reason for the formation of the final result in the mind of the criminal: “A woman cannot stand her neighbor in the garden, envies her successes and wants all sorts of troubles, and also wants you to leave. As a result of these feelings and motives, a goal is born - to deprive the neighbor of her home. The woman sets the fire."

The concepts of motive and purpose largely relate to the psychology of crime. It can be very difficult to identify them.

However, despite the amorphous nature of these concepts, the legislator identified two groups of motives:

Base motives are those that are condemned by society. These include: hostility due to belonging to a particular race or religious beliefs, blood feud, self-interest, concealing another crime, hooliganism, etc.
motives that do not have a base basis: jealousy, the desire to prevent another crime, “fair”, from the point of view of the criminal, revenge.

The motives of the first group usually lead to increased punishment. Whereas the motives of the second group either soften it or do not affect the sentence.

The rules of criminal law are formulated in such a way that:

in some of them, the legislator initially stipulates that the act will be considered a crime for certain purposes and motives;
the goals and motives are embedded in the name of the crime (terrorism);
goals and motives are implied but not stated.

In any situation, goals and motives must be taken into account by the court.

Forms of emotional states

In philosophy and psychology, there are 4 categories that differ in their duration and strength. These include mood, passion, affect and feeling. The latter is a form that reflects reality and expresses the individual’s subjective attitude towards satisfying his own needs, the degree of compliance of something with his perceptions. Affect is a strong but short-lived feeling. It is associated with complete immobility (stupor, numbness) or with a motor reaction. Passion is a long-lasting and strong feeling. Mood acts as a resultant category. This state is characterized by stability and duration. Mood acts as a background against which other mental processes take place. It should be noted that not all emotions are endowed with criminal legal significance and may be an element of the subjective side.

Emotions and crime

It was noted above that the cause of a crime can be an emotional outburst in the consciousness of the person committing the crime.
Fear, anger, and despair suddenly rushing over a person can lead him into a state of passion. Many diploma and term papers are devoted to the study of this mental aspect. Briefly, we can say that this is a state of a person when he loses control over his will for some time. Then negative emotions can break out in any form available at that time.

Speaking about affect, psychologists identify two main types of it:

The pathological variety manifests itself in the fact that a person, due to certain mental disorders, cannot control his actions. If the presence of such a condition is proven in the defendant, he ceases to be considered as such, since the Criminal Code does not classify him as a group of people who may be guilty of any crime.
The physiological variety manifests itself in a single, but very noticeable surge of emotion, during which the activity of the intellect and will is inhibited, and negative feelings come to the fore. This condition does not relieve the offender of guilt, but can be taken into account when sentencing in the direction of mitigating the charge. True, this is only possible if the affect was caused by the actions of the injured party.

For example, before the incident, the victim threatened the life of the offender’s child. The latter, in fear for the baby, takes actions to save him and injures or kills the threat. This situation will serve to mitigate the punishment.

Classification

The motive for the crime may be:

Antisocial. In this case, we are talking about selfish-violent, selfish, violent-aggressive, political motives.
Asocial – anarcho-individualistic, selfish, etc. These motives are considered less dangerous
Pseudosocial. This motive for the crime is determined by the interest of a particular group, contrary to the law, personal freedom or society as a whole. It can be formed on the basis of false partnership, which leads to aggressive violent clashes, or corporatism, which results in economic violations, atrocities against the law, and so on.
Protosocial. Its formation consists in the transition of a socially approved motive into a socially negative one. For example, violation of the law by exceeding the necessary defense, measures taken for detention, etc. Such motives include jealousy and revenge, which are formed fleetingly in conditions of conflict. They are characterized by increased affectivity.

Also, some motives are typical for intentional crimes, others - for crimes of negligence. Some may have both signs. For example, self-interest, jealousy, revenge, careerism, hooligan motives can act as motives for intentional violations. But they can also become the basis for careless actions. As for the goals, they are quite diverse. Thus, the violator may be motivated by the desire for profit, causing harm to society or an individual citizen, etc.

Connection with sentencing

To choose the most appropriate and fair measure, it is first necessary to correctly qualify the violation. This is impossible without taking into account the purpose and motive. Without these components, it is also impossible to properly fulfill the requirements of the principle of individualization of responsibility. Motives have a close connection with circumstances that mitigate or aggravate guilt. For example, the first include motivations inherent in actions both in necessary defense and when limits are exceeded against the background of the desire to protect personal, social, and state interests from dangerous attacks. Regardless of whether aspirations and motives are included in the structure of an illegal action as mandatory features or not, they are endowed with criminal legal significance. This is due, among other things, to the importance of these elements in the study and prevention of illegal activities.