The problems of a reduced inquiry

More than a year has passed since federal law supplemented the chapter "A reduced inquiry" of the Criminal Procedural Code of the Russian Federation (CPC of the RF). On the whole the changes were highly regarded by scientists who recommended the introduced model of a reduced inquiry to be actively used. In the Tomsk region, the correlation of criminal cases where the inquiry was a reduced one to the cases where an inquiry was made according to the standard procedure was about 2%. The reason for this is that the institution of a reduced inquiry in criminal procedural legislation does not fully meet the interests of both the public and the parties to a trial. Having charged the inquirer with the duty to explain the rights to file a motion and to satisfy it, legislators regard the public interests to be of paramount importance. But legislators didn't provide for the conditions which exclude the reduced inquiry: both the evidence of a person's guilt in the commission of a crime which was gathered at the time of filing a motion and the absence of evidence of guilt of a person. Though, the non-provision of the above conditions is against the public interests. The CPC of the RF allows for the use of information which is obtained when the reported crime is checked beyond the procedure of gathering the evidence in the course of inquiry itself. On the one hand, these innovations can precipitate the criminal procedure. On the other hand, in the above situation the establishment of facts in the criminal case is, in fact, transferred to the stage of the initiation of a criminal case, and this can lead to the confusion of procedural and non-procedural activities, including the operative investigative activity and the violation of the rights and legal interests of those involved in the procedural actions when the reported crime is to be checked. The rules of evidence cannot be different because of the type of procedure. It's theoretically incorrect when, during the reduced inquiry, an investigating officer has the right not to interrogate those people who gave their explanations as far as the reported crime is concerned, but is obliged to interrogate them during the usual inquiry or preliminary investigations to substantiate the facts which matter for the case. Criminal procedural legislation doesn't call on the investigating officer to check all available evidence but only that evidence called upon put by the parties to a trial. Meanwhile, according to the Article 17 of the CPC of the RF no evidence is of force which was established beforehand. As a result, the investigating officer is obliged to check all gathered evidence regardless of the parties' attitude to it otherwise, investigative and judicial mistakes are possible and this contradicts both the public interests and the legal interests of those involved in the criminal procedure.

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