On further differentiation of the criminal procedure in Russia

By criminal procedure one should understand a certain type of criminal procedure activity; an independent institute of criminal procedure law; an institute of criminal procedure legislation, whose norms regulate the criminal procedure activities within an independent multi-stage proceedings. The differentiation of criminal proceedings implies classifying the criminal procedure not only by the complexity of the procedural form, but also by the aspect of the proceedings expressed in its object and tasks. By this criterion all criminal procedures can be divided into 1) basic - criminal cases proceedings; 2) ancillary - proceedings arising in the process of real sentence execution (not to be confused with the stage of sentence execution); 3) special - proceedings materially based on the norms of administrative (Article 51 of the Criminal Procedure Code of the Russian Federation), civil (a civil suit in a criminal trial), constitutional (Part 2 of Article 29, Article 125 Article 51 of the Criminal Procedure Code of the Russian Federation) and other material branches of law (compensation for harm as rehabilitation). Having classified the proceedings, the criterion of complexity of the procedural form should be applied. Basic proceedings have the following types: regular proceedings with pre-trial activity in the form of preliminary investigation and the court of first instance hearing and solving the case in a regular way; simplified proceedings; and proceedings with more complex procedural forms. Pre-trial proceedings should imply protocol pre-trial proceedings; police inquiry (faster and simpler that the preliminary investigation); preliminary investigation by officers of one investigation agency. Differentiation also means differentiation of the bench that hears criminal cases at first instance. In this respect, I believe, a professional judge alone should only consider cases of minor offence providing the consent of both the defendant and the victim. Cases of heavy and especially grave crimes must be considered collegially, by a professional judge and two lay judges (people's assessors). It is not proposed to eliminate the jury: with lay judges it will occur naturally, as it already happened in Russia at the end of the 19th - beginning of the 20th centuries.

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