Retrospective of Criminal Liability of Persons with a Mental Disorder that Does Not Exclude Sanity in Russian Legislation

The article analyzes the emergence and development in domestic science and criminal law of ideas about the limited, or reduced, sanity of persons suffering from mental disorders. The main approaches to various aspects of this problem of prominent Russian and Soviet lawyers, as well as leading representatives of psychiatry, are considered. Particular emphasis is placed on article 22 of the current Criminal Code of the Russian Federation, which actually reveals the concept of “limited sanity,” despite the lack of a clear definition of the latter, and also indicates the medical criterion that should be guided in such cases. It was noted that it was impossible to effectively solve the analyzed problem without developing a unified definition of this concept, which would be based on the synthesis of legal and medical sanity criteria.