The system of consideration of circumstances affecting the amount of criminal punishment

Introduction. The gradual development of the institution of punishment in the Russian criminal law has predetermined the legislative consolidation of a multidirectional and diverse system of sanctions for unlawful behaviour of a person having violated a criminal-legal prohibition; humanisation of types and amounts of punishment; expansion of the list of additional circumstances characterising the unlawful act or the person that committed it, which the court take into account when passing a sentence. However, the problem of proper understanding of the circumstances affecting the amount of criminal punishment, as well as their uniform consideration in determining the measure of responsibility of a person who has violated a criminal-law prohibition, continues to be one of the most urgent for the national criminal law, because without solving it, judicial and investigative practice will lack a regulator preventing the overgrowth of permissible discretion into lawlessness, and the Special Part of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation will retain an unreasonable volume of legislative criminal- legal prohibitions. Methods. In the course of scientific research, we used general scientific methods (dialectical, system analysis, structural, formal-logical, analysis, synthesis, induction, deduction, analogy, functional) and special-legal methods of research (technical-legal, dogmatic, comparative-legal). Results. The article states and justifies the proposal, according to which creating a more effective mechanism of differentiation and individualisation of criminal liability requires a fundamentally new system of taking into account the circumstances, characterising the criminal act and the person who committed it, implying maximum specification of the degree of influence of these circumstances on the type and amount of punishment imposed. The above proposal is also aimed at “unloading” and “easing” to a certain extent the constructions of the overwhelming majority of criminal-legal prohibitions of the Special Part of the RF Criminal Code. To implementthe formulated proposal, the author considers it necessary to make appropriate amendments to the current RF Criminal Code.