Appointment of punishment for deliberate infliction of grievous bodily harm that negligently caused death of the victim (Part 4, Article 111 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation)

Legislative penalisation of deliberate infliction of grievous bodily harm that negligently caused the death of the victim (Part 4, Article 111 of the Criminal Code) has been analysed in a number of research papers, whereas practical penalisation of this crime has never been in the focus of legal studies. In this paper the author uses the 2009-2017 statistics of the official accounts of the Judicial Department at the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation to analyse the practice of appointing punishment for this type of crimes, as well as the impact the 2011 exclusion of the lower limit from the sanction had on it. The appointed penalties are represented by a real deprivation of freedom and suspended sentence involving imprisonment. The aggregate share of other measures (restrictions on freedom, correctional labour, fine and suspended sentence involving other types of penalties) does not exceed 0.05%. Firstly, the relative weight of suspended sentence involving deprivation of liberty is not significant. Secondly, since 2012, it has been consistently declining. The share of real imprisonment increased from 97.77% in 2012 to 99.44% in the first half of 2017. The exclusion of the lower limit of five years imprisonment from the sanction did not entail an increase in the deprivation of liberty for a term less than five years, despite the fears of possible widespread appointment of ultimately soft measures by courts. The analysed dynamics of those convicted for deliberate infliction of grievous bodily harm that negligently caused the death of the victim who were sentenced to long periods of deprivation of liberty show that the proportion of those sentenced to imprisonment for more than ten years decreased only in the first years following the change of sanctions. Since 2012, it has steadily increased, reaching 6.39% in 2016, and 7.18% in the first half of 2017. A similar dynamics can be observed among those sentenced to more than eight years up to ten years imprisonment inclusive. It indicates that the severity of criminal repression after mitigating the sanction of Part 4 Article 111 of the Criminal Code is increasing. The sanction for a related crime -manslaughter (Part 1 Article 105 of the Criminal Code) - on the highest limit (fifteen years of imprisonment) coincides with the sanction for the crime provided for in Part 4 Article 111 of the Criminal Code. The analysis of the appointment of punishment for manslaughter suggests that the share of actual imprisonment for both crimes analyzed be practically the same in 2016 and in the first half of 2017, and only slightly different in 2012-2015. However, this does not mean that practical penalisation does not distinguish between these crimes when choosing penalties. Penalties assigned for manslaughter are mainly within eight to fifteen years imprisonment inclusive (in 2016 -51.97%, in the first half of 2017 - 52.63%), whereas punishments for the crime under Part 4 Article 111 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation are mainly from three to eight years imprisonment inclusive (in 2016 - 61.27%, in the first half of 2017 - 62.14%).

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