Lighter Penalties than Prescribed by Law Enforcement: Can Judicial Discretion Be Restricted?

The purpose of the study is the analyzing and summarizing the main problems which are found in the practice of imposing a sentence milder than provided by law, as well as to find the ways and the means of solving them, synthesis and analysis of the scientific proposals on these issues, substantiation of the correctness of some of them. Therefore, the authors present the results of the studied court decisions on sentencing issues with taking into account the provisions of Article 64 of the Criminal Code and give them a critical assessment. The authors also pay particular attention to the imposition of a punishment that is lenient than prescribed by law for certain types of crimes, and above all the crimes in the field of drug trafficking. Taking into account the high public danger of drug-related crimes it is noted that there is a need to change some judicial approaches of sentencing these types of crime in practice. The opinion of the necessity of imposing the legislative prohibitions on mitigation of the punishment for these types of crime is substantiated.

Conclusions. Based on the results of the research some recommendations ate developed for improving the Article 64 of the Criminal Code, as well as proposals for amending the acts of judicial interpretation of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation. It is proposed to limit the discretionary powers of judges, as well as to prohibit the use of exceptional mitigation in individual cases, for example, the simultaneous application of two mitigation rules. The judges should be obligated to give detailed reasons for their decision to admit certain circumstances as extraordinary in the descriptive part of the verdict. The authors of the given article make conclusion about the need to prohibit applications on the provisions of article 64 of the Criminal Code in relation to crimes in the field of illicit drug trafficking, indicating their list in the part 3 of the named article.