One topic, which I continue to monitor: How does the introduction in August 2023 of the extremely drastic measure of revocation of the motor vehicle or the award of its equivalent affect the registered offenses of driving with a concentration of alcohol in the blood above 1.2 per mille? Andrey Yankulov from the Anti-Corruption Fund asks this question on Facebook.
He recalls that the Constitutional Court will also rule on the constitutionality of the measure.
"It is another episode of the escalation of criminal repression for this crime over the last 20 years, which started with only an administrative penalty of a fine of low value and reached a cumulative imposition in each case and without judgment, along with deprivation of freedom (conditional or effective), of a potentially very heavy property sanction when driving, for example, a truck or an expensive car," Yankulov stressed.
The bad thing, according to him, is that so far the available data show that there is practically no impact on the number of registered crimes.
The only month with a drastic decrease is September 2023, when the amendment to the law was recently passed, was a hot topic and was commented on a lot in the media. For September, the registered cases were 287, whereas for the same month in 2022 and 2021, there were 395 and 388, respectively.
However, after the topic died down publicly, the levels of registered crimes by the end of 2023 normalized to close to those of the previous two years.
"For January 2024, we have 342 registered offenses of driving a motor vehicle after using alcohol over 1.2 per thousand, and for the same month of 2023 and 2022, there are 343 and 345, respectively. For February 2024 - 321 , and for the same month of the previous two years, they were 306 and 309, respectively," the lawyer reports.
This is despite the new sanction, which, because of its drasticness alone, should, according to the populist understanding of how the criminal law works, automatically lead to a large reduction in the commission of the particular crime.
He makes a recommendation to the institutions, at least one year after the measure comes into force, to conduct a comprehensive study that will comprehensively analyze the effect of its introduction - dynamics of inspections by control bodies and established cases, impact on the timeliness of criminal proceedings, impact on the final result of the criminal cases, how many and what kind of motor vehicles reach the actual confiscation or award of equivalence, etc.
"In any case, there should be a lot of food for thought for the legislator from the effect of such populist exercises in criminal justice," Yankulov concludes.