Развитие уголовного права Англии

Prominent works on criminal law were for centuries primarily concerned with what were called the ‘pleas of the Crown’. The extensive jurisdictional reach of the criminal law, as a nationwide system, was based on royal authority. Pleas of the Crown were cases in which the Crown claimed jurisdiction over the alleged offence, taking precedence over the application of local law and custom, and over compensation arrangements between the offender and the victim (or between their families). Moreover, from the sixteenth century onwards, the legislature increasingly turned into pleas of the Crown cases—many of which involved offences against religion or morality—that had previously been within the jurisdiction of the Church courts. As we will see, this development considerably broadened the remit of ‘Crown law’, with harsh and enduring consequences for offenders.
Pleas of the Crown were divided into treason, felonies—at one time, meaning the betrayal of one’s lord and master—and offences called misdemeanours. Until the middle of the nineteenth century, many felonies were capital—death penalty—offences. Felonies ranged from the most serious, such as murder, down to innumerable offences involving the regulation and protection of trade, or state business, in the interests of the common good.
Historical examples of the latter were selling a horse to a ‘Scotchman’, wilfully obstructing someone lawfully serving a writ in the Royal Mint, or causing a nuisance on the highway or on a bridge. Accordingly, the crimes included in their treatises by early writers on criminal law were a broad-ranging collection, like those included in major modern works directed at practitioners and the judiciary. Until the twentieth century, and the advent of the modern university law course, there was no need for writers to concentrate only on a much narrower set of crimes, chosen with an eye to enthralling student readers and impressing on them the potential gravity of criminal law’s concerns.
The development of criminal law in England, and in particular its adaptation to the conditions of capitalist society, took place in special ways. In contrast to the later bourgeois revolutions, the English revolution of the seventeenth century did not essentially affect feudal law, which basically did not change even at the beginning of the nineteenth century, when in most European countries criminal law was brought into line with the social relations of bourgeois society [5].
A significant number of criminal acts in England were prosecuted under the rules of either common law or numerous statutes establishing responsibility for the same crime (400 statutes were punished for forgery). The system of sanctions was notable for its monstrous cruelty. Over 200 statutes provided for the death penalty as the only punishment, mostly in its qualified forms (by public burning, stabbing, quartering, etc.). The death penalty was recognized as the “main” punishment, and all the others as “minor” [1]. These included hard labor, a reference to galleys, imprisonment, public flogging, and other corporal punishment.
The movement for the reform of criminal law in the late XVIII - early XIX century led only to the abolition of the most cruel laws and to a certain simplification and streamlining of the criminal law. As a result of the successive issuance of separate parliamentary acts, a genuine reform of the criminal law was carried out, which basically adapted the criminal law to the needs of capitalist society. During the reform, several hundred obsolete statutes were abolished, replacing consolidated acts providing for responsibility for certain groups of crimes (theft, forgery, damage to property, counterfeiting, crimes against the person).
The death penalty for property crimes (other than those accompanied by the use of violence), self-inflicting and defamatory punishments (stigmatizing, exhibiting a pillory, etc.) were abolished, although the whipping of criminals was preserved. In 1857, the widely distributed link in the colonies was abolished, mainly due to protests from the colony’s economically and politically strong bourgeoisie (for example, Australia). In place of this, the system of places of deprivation of liberty within the country was legislatively fixed, the main elements of which were hard labor and imprisonment.
Both in the content of the reform of the English criminal law, and in the methods of its implementation (gradualness, half-heartedness, unwillingness to completely break with the past, emphasized respect for "traditions", length of time, etc.), England-specific methods of managing society have affected. At the same time, the attempt to issue a criminal code for England was unsuccessful: the draft, drawn up in 1877 by the well-known lawyer J. Stifen on behalf of the Lord Chancellor and the Attorney General [3], did not become a matter for consideration in Parliament.
Further development of the English criminal legislation continues through the issuance of new consolidated acts that make changes to previously issued statutes. Over the past decade, the activities of the English Parliament in this area have intensified significantly, which is primarily due to the need for a flexible punitive policy due to a significant increase in crime in the country.
Among the existing criminal laws, the overwhelming majority are acts adopted in the course of the reform of 1830-1880 and after it, although there are earlier ones. The legislation in the field of criminal law, in comparison with the norms of common law, now covers almost all the main institutions of the Common Part, with the exception of defining specific forms of guilt and insanity criteria set forth in judicial precedents.
Legally significant features characterizing specific types of crimes are also, as a rule, now contained in the relevant legislative acts. However, there are a number of crimes, including grave and simple murder, the signs of which are determined by the norms of common law, and the punishment is established by parliamentary acts.
The most important laws that regulate primarily the issues of the General Part of Criminal Law include the following [4]:
- The Law on Criminal Law of 1967, which defines a new classification of criminal offenses and abolishes their traditional division into felonies and misdemeanors;
- The Law on Criminal Law of 1977, with subsequent additions and clarifications, determining responsibility for conspiracy and solving some other issues of the General Part;