The purpose of the criminal law characterization of inaction

Relevance. The legal nature of inaction as a form of criminal behavior remains controversial due to the difficulty of distinguishing between criminally punishable inaction and ordinary passive behavior. Making a correct assessment of an individual's passive illegal behavior is more difficult than qualifying his active illegal actions, especially when the purpose of his inaction is not obvious. In this regard, an in-depth study of the purposefulness of passive behavior is required to determine the impact of the purpose of criminally punishable inaction on the qualification of crimes.

The purpose of the study is to form a scientific understanding of the purpose of criminally punishable inaction, based on this, to develop an algorithm for qualifying intentional and reckless inaction.

Objectives: to characterize the purposefulness of an individual's passive behavior; to correlate it with the purposefulness of unlawful, socially dangerous inaction; to identify the features of the purpose of the subject's behavior that have criminal significance.

The research methodology was based on general scientific and private scientific methods of cognition of objective reality. Among them are the dialectical method, methods of induction, deduction, analysis, synthesis, and the formal logical method.

Results. Passive behavior of an individual and criminally punishable inaction are characterized and correlated, and their definitions are given. The pattern of purposeful behavior is determined. The peculiarities of purposefulness of passive behavior, which have criminal legal significance, are revealed. An algorithm for the qualification of intentional and careless inaction is formulated.

Conclusions. The results of this study contribute to a deeper scientific understanding of the impact of the purpose of criminally punishable inaction on the qualification of crimes. Any volitional and conscious human activity is characterized by purposefulness. The purpose of an individual's behavior influences qualifications not only in connection with its consolidation in the norms of the Special Part of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation, but also based on the characteristics of human behavior as a whole. When qualifying inaction, in addition to the purpose of passive behavior of the subject, it is necessary to evaluate his past experience, accumulated knowledge or competencies.

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