CRIMINAL RESPONSIBILITY AS A FUNDAMENTAL INSTITUTION OF CRIMINAL LAW

Abstract

The article is devoted to the study of the prerequisites for the emergence and signs of legal responsibility. The author analyzes the definitions of criminal responsibility provided in the science of criminal law, its main features, stages, grounds for its occurrence, forms of implementation and related institutions of criminal law. Criminal responsibility is viewed as a type of legal responsibility that is associated with state condemnation, is individualized by the court and consists in imposing certain negative consequences on the guilty person in the form of restriction of rights and freedoms defined in the law. The social and legal essence of criminal responsibility is that it is: the state’s reaction to a criminal offense committed by a person; official state recognition of an act as a criminal offense in a court verdict, and the person who committed it as guilty; causes certain adverse consequences for the subject of a criminal offense in the form of sanctions provided for by the current Criminal Code of Ukraine. It has been analyzed the stages of criminal responsibility which are associated with a certain procedural procedure for proving the guilt of a subject and the stages of criminal proceedings, each of which ends with a certain procedural decision. It has been established that the emergence, realization, and termination of criminal liability are carried out within the framework of protective criminal law relations. The author draws the following conclusions: criminal responsibility arises from the moment a court verdict of guilty comes into force and is terminated from the moment a criminal record is repaid or removed criminal responsibility is associated with conviction and can be realized in the following forms: 1) conviction of the perpetrator without imposing a penalty; 2) conviction of the perpetrator with the imposition of a certain sentence and sending him/her to actually serve the sentence, etc. 3) conviction of the perpetrator with the imposition of a certain sentence and release from actually serving it or release from part of the unexpired sentence.