The System of Measures of Procedural Compulsion According to the Statute of Criminal Procedure of November 20, 1864

The author analyzes the system of measures of procedural compulsion under the Statute of Criminal Procedure of November 20, 1864, which contained a rather extensive system of these measures. The Statute included such measures as: bringing to court, money penalty, detention, and measures of restriction. Although the Statute did not single out detention as a separate measure of compulsion, in was, in fact, included in the law, as a number of its Articles used the term “detention” and, according to its contents, it was a temporary restraint of freedom used by the police. The system of restrictive measures was also rather diverse and included six such measures. The names of these measures directly indicated the goal of their use: “restricting the opportunities for evading the investigation for the defendant”. This goal determined their contents and the procedure of their use. The author analyzes the opinions of pre-revolutionary proceduralists (P.I. Lyublinskii, N.N. Rozin, I.Ya Foinitskii and others) who, in their works, presented their assessments of the system of measures of procedural compulsion and called for its greater humanization. In spite of the diversity of restrictive measures, detention in custody was widely used in practice, and the periods of such detention were rather long. Famous proceduralists suggested that detention in custody should only be used as a last resort in a limited number of cases. The Statute laid profound legal foundations for the future development of the system of measures of procedural compulsion, which then became the basis for all later criminal procedure legal acts, including the current Criminal Procedure Code of the Russian Federation.