The prosecutor effect in trials for petty violent offences in Russia

ABSTRACT

The paper utilises the duality of criminal procedure in Russia - with or without the participation of public prosecutor - to compare trial outcomes for petty violent offences in the two types of trial and examine the effects associated with the participation of the public prosecutor in court. Controlling for the selection of cases into the public prosecutor track as well as for legal and extralegal characteristics of offence and offender, the analysis establishes that the participation of the public prosecutor in trials reduces the probability of acquittal and increases the probability termination of case in connection with reconciliation of parties. Another dimension of the public prosecutor effect is the mitigation of disparities in the likelihood of acquittal associated with the occupational status of defendant, save for the law enforcement employees. The latter are more likely to be acquitted than defendants with other occupational status and are less probable to reconcile with the victim.

KEYWORDS:

• Public prosecution
• Russia
• acquittal
• sentencing
• criminal trial
• violent offences

Acknowledgments

The author is thankful to Dmitriy Skougarevskiy, Kirill Titaev, Irina Chetverikova, Maria Shklyaruk, Stanislav Rumyantsev and Hatsuru Morita for their help and critical comments at various stages of this work.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. In contrast to private prosecution cases, the acquittal rate in public prosecution cases in Russia (those processed only with preliminary investigation and supported by the public prosecutor) is about 0,4 per cent (and 20 per cent of cases are terminated in court).

2. In 2001–2010 the private prosecution also included “insult”. In 2017 “battery” committed for the first time was decriminalised and made an administrative offence.

3. Article 20, Part 2 of the Russian Criminal Procedure Code: “Criminal cases on crimes envisaged by Articles 115, Part One and 116, Part One of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation, are seen as criminal cases of private prosecution, are initiated only upon application from the victim or from his legal representative, except for the cases stipulated by Part Four of this Article, and are subject to termination in connection with the reconciliation of the victim with the accused.” Part 4: “The head of an investigative agency, the investigator, as well as the inquirer with the consent of the procurator shall institute a criminal case on any crime indicated in Parts Two and Three of this Article, and in the absence of an application of the victim or his legal representative, if the crime has been committed with respect of a person who, due to his dependent or helpless state or for other reasons cannot defend his rights and legal interests. The other reasons shall also include the case of commission of a crime by a person the information about whom is unknown.” Full text of the Code in English available at https://www.unodc.org/res/cld/document/rus/1996/the-criminal-procedure-code-of-the-russian-federation_html/Russia_Criminal_Procedure_Code_2001_as_amd_2012.pdf

4. The jurisdiction of the Prosecutor’s Office is a large district of the city of Saint-Petersburg. Before being assigned to the position of the Head of the Office, the respondent worked as prosecutor in other city districts and as investigator in a small suburban town. The interview took place on 11 June 2014, lasted for over two hours, is fully recorded and transcribed.

5. Since 2011 the Judicial Department of the Supreme Court in Moscow assembled statistical cards from all regional courts at the central server. In 2012 and 2014, the Institute for the Rule of Law of the European University at Saint-Petersburg requested and was given access to these cards for research purposes. The institute then converted them into the dataset. Dmitriy Skougarevskiy identified the source of data and conducted a titanic work of creating, ordering, and cleaning the dataset in cooperation with Kirill Titaev, Irina Chetverikova, and Mikhail Pozdnyakov.

6. https://rospravosudie.com/

7. The author is thankful to Irina Chatsverykova for creating the additional dataset.

8. Courts are obliged to publicise verdict texts but there is no unified standard regarding the form and detail. As a result, different courts include different kind of case information. The merger strategy included matching available combinations of criminal case number, verdict date, judge name, first two primary charges, court type, and region name in verdict texts and the main dataset of court decisions.

9. The logic of constructing occupational status variables is explicated in more detail in (Volkov, 2016).

10. As another study established (Volkov, 2016), in trials for more serious crimes (felonies), law enforcers get harsher sentences than other categories of defendants, because the Criminal Code regards a premeditated crime committed by a law enforcement employee an aggravating circumstance.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the Russian Science Foundation Grant [17-18-01681].

Notes on contributors

Vadim Volkov

Vadim Volkov received his PhD in sociology from Cambridge University (UK) and Doctor of Science degree from the Higher School of Economics (Russia). He is the Academic Director of the Institute for the Rule of Law of the European University at Saint-Petersburg. His research interests focus on sentencing, legal profession, social and organisational frameworks of criminal justice, organised crime.