Questions of development of cassation proceedings in Russian criminal procedure

A number of drawbacks in cassation proceedings require elimination. To strengthen the stability of sentence the legislators reduced the number of its checks. Law presumes the validity of sentence to be verified only once - in the court of appeal. However, it is possible to ignore this rule and increase the number of verifications. If a cassation body cancels the sentence in connection with the violation of law and sends the case for a new trial in the court of first instance or the court of appeal, the case will always be reviewed in full (including the validity revision). This can be done repeatedly. Therefore, the reduction of verifications of sentences is not always achievable indeed and this adversely affects the stability of sentences. To eliminate this it is necessary to restore the rule provided by the Charter of Criminal Legal Proceedings 1864 allowing the verification of final sentences only once. The law prescribes the cassation bodies to verify only the legality of sentences but not their reasonableness. This rule is not always feasible. Verification of legality is often impossible without the verification of reasonableness. Disregard of the validity of sentences puts the cassation court in the position, which is not corresponding to the status of the court as a judicial body. The court of cassation studies the whole case, and at the same time, it is capable to find an error in the validity of sentence. However, checking nothing else but legality, it should not notice the lack of validity found by it. This seems to be unnatural. The court of cassation is also a tribunal, and in its capacity as such, it is obliged to react to any errors in sentences. The following measures will help to eliminate the above drawbacks. It is expedient to include the verification of sentence validity into the subject of cassation. However, in this case cassation should have the features of exclusiveness. Unlike the appeal, there should bу special grounds for cassation. Such grounds include not essential but only fundamental errors in sentences. It is expedient to reduce the activity of cassation to judicial errors. The courts of the first and appeal instances have to be involved in the correction of mistakes. It is required to keep the rule owing to which the cassation can cancel a sentence only when the existence of mistake has been established authentically.

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