A Criminal Misconduct and the Mechanism of its Establishment

The study is focused on the development of the theory of a criminal misconduct as an independent type of a criminal offense. The aim of the work was to formulate the author’s definition of a criminal misconduct that meets the social demand for the liberalization of the branch of criminal legislation. In the course of the research, the dialectical method was used, which made it possible to discover and analyze the common nature and, at the same time, the independence of a criminal offence and a criminal misconduct A universal tool of cognition was combined with such specific scientific methods as systemic and formal-logical methods. The theses developed in the work are based on the analysis of the content of criminal legislation, as well as the corresponding standins of the Plenum of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation and representatives of the criminal law doctrine. The author gives examples from judicial practice as illustrations of legally significant situations that receive an ambiguous criminal-legal assessment at the level of law enforcement. Based on the results of the study, the concept of a criminal offense was formulated and the mechanism of its establishment was revealed. A criminal misconduct is justified as an act, although it contains signs of any corpus delicti, formally belonging to the category of small or medium severity, but recognized by the court, due to its insignificance, as not posing a public danger. The mechanism for establishing a criminal misconduct presupposes a statement in the act of the category of public danger (formal signs of corpus delicti) and further exclusion of the degree of public danger and, as a consequence, public danger in general. The ideas presented in the work can serve as a motive and basis for rethinking issues related to the substantiation of the nature of a criminal misconduct and its delimitation from other legal torts.