The Content of Consciousness Required for Attributing Intent in Criminal Law: On the Unintended Consequences of the Amendment of Article 28 § 1 of the Criminal Code

The study is devoted to considerations on the elements necessary to establish the consciousness of the perpetrator of a prohibited act in order to be able to impute intentionality to him. It is partly theoretical in nature in those parts where examples of theoretical approaches to the problem of culpability in the criminal law literature are described, as well as the consequences of these approaches for the legal regulations in force at a given time. It is also of a historical and reporting nature, since in order to provide a complete picture of the dogmatic analyses, it is also necessary to present past disputes concerning the interpretation of legal regulations relating to the subjective side of a prohibited act and fault under the previous criminal codes. Finally, the study is of a dogmatic nature, as its main objective is to argue in favour of the thesis that the amendment of Article 28 § 1 of the Criminal Code, which entered into force on 1 July 2015, and which resulted in the elimination from the legal order of the construction of an unjustified error as to a circumstance constituting the substantiation of a prohibited act, has consequences, unintended by the legislator, for the determination of which of the elements constituting the content of the consciousness of the perpetrator of a prohibited act are, since the entry into force of this amendment, necessary for the assumption of intention. It may be argued that at present, neither the content of Article 9 § 1 of the Criminal Code, nor the content of Article 28 § 1 of the Criminal Code, Article 29 of the Criminal Code, nor the content of Article 30 of the Criminal Code determines the content of consciousness required for ascribing intent, but it is determined only by the nature of the elements used in the description of the prohibited act type.