Statute of limitations under the penal law of Bulgaria

Ukraine carries out intensive judicial cooperation in criminal matters with other European countries. A typical impediment to granting Ukrainian requests for such cooperation (e.g. extradition from another country, taking over Ukrainian criminal proceedings by the requested foreign country, recognition and enforcement of Ukrainian criminal judgments abroad) is the expiry of the time limitation period [lapse of time] not only under the Ukrainian law but also under the law of the foreign country that Ukraine requests for cooperation. The problem is that the criminal statute of limitations of most European countries is significantly different from the Ukrainian one. In view thereof, Ukrainian criminal lawyers are interested in having some general knowledge of the statute of limitations of other European countries, esp. such as Bulgaria. On the one hand, this foreign country has always been a steady partner of Ukraine in international judicial cooperation. On the other hand, the Bulgarian statute of limitations constitutes a good example of the different type of legal framework for lapse of time that requesting Ukrainian authorities shall necessarily consider. All penal laws of the contemporary Bulgarian state contained some statute of limitations. These laws are the 1896 Penal Law (repealed), the 1951 Penal Law upgraded to the 1956 Penal Code, after the full codification of this branch of law in Bulgaria (also repealed), and the existing Penal Code of 1968. The criminal statute of limitations outlines periods when competent state authorities have been inactive. The expiry of these periods (the lapse of time under law) extinguishes the immediate legal consequences of crimes or the punishments imposed by the court for them. In Bulgaria, the statute of limitations consists of substantive penal law provisions. This is a legislative recognition of its substantive nature. The concept that the criminal statute of limitation is a procedural legal institution has been overcome in Bulgarian theory, law and judicial practice. The statute of limitations produces procedural consequences also but they derive from its direct substantive law results as secondary effects. As in most other countries, the penal law of Bulgaria prescribes two types of limitation periods. The first one runs after the commission of the offence. It is also called 'limitation of the offence'; its expiry entails the extinction of the offender’s criminal liability preventing both the imposition of punishment on him/her and his/her conviction status as well. The second type of limitation period occurs after the imposition of an executable punishment. It is also called 'limitation of the punishment'; its expiry entails the extinction of the punishment imposed only. It does not eliminate the fact that the offender has been convicted. Under the Bulgarian Penal Code, each of the two types of statute of limitations includes not only general time limitations but also absolute ones as well. The former is applicable when the competent state authorities have not undertaken required activities whereas the latter applies only if the competent state authorities have failed to achieve a required result, namely: the imposition of punishment on the offender or the execution of his/her punishment.

Rights

This chapter uses two well-known Supreme Court cases—Powell v. Texas and Morissette v. United States—to frame the subsequent discussion. It offers the reasonable doubt test as a way for each citizen to decide for himself if a proposed limit on democratic authority is a legitimate limit. It introduces formulations of the actus reus and mens rea meant to pass that test, such that they can serve as immunity rights limiting the authority of a democratic states to ascribe guilt to those accused of crimes. It distinguishes actus reus and mens rea as they are conventionally understood (as tools lawyers use to analyze and dissect the elements of criminal statute) from how they will be understood here (as immunity rights). It explains how actus reus and mens rea so understood mean one thing when applied to defendants who realized they were committing a crime and another thing when they didn’t realize they were committing a crime. It then details how mens rea is ultimately grounded in an ill or indifferent will—a lack of sufficient concern for the law and its ends—and proposes a test (the Jekyll test) for sorting ill and indifferent wills from law-abiding ones.

Punishing Disease

The criminalization fever has arrived, and recent developments suggest it may be contagious. In 2014, Iowa reconsidered its HIV-specific criminal law after a widely reported case involving an HIV-positive gay man accused of having sex with a condom yielded a twenty-five-year prison term and lifetime sex offender registration. After a statewide advocacy campaign, the Iowa legislature moved to reduce the penalties for cases involving low risk—a success that was widely heralded by advocates as a sign of “modernization.” Less discussed was the simultaneous move to add a bevy of other infectious diseases to the criminal law, including tuberculosis and hepatitis. Left-leaning advocacy groups celebrated this shift as a triumph over AIDS stigma. Iowa’s legislative reform comes on the heels of a similar expansion in Tennessee, where the legislature voted to extend their HIV-specific criminal statute to individuals infected with Hepatitis B or C. These troubling developments suggest that the logic of criminalizing diseases is spreading and becoming more deeply entrenched in American society. This chapter reviews how this happened and explains why it is a problem for American society.

Judicial Discretion: Theory and Practice of Regional Applications

The article presents the author´s point of view on the problematic issues of judicial discretion within the framework of implementation of the principle of justice with regard to law enforcement practice of courts of General jurisdiction. The goal of the study is the actualization of theoretical provisions and making recommendations for improving the effectiveness of fair practice purposes of criminal punishment. The author considers judicial discretion from the standpoint of the relativity of freedom of choice in judicial decision making, which is conditional and limited, as it is done within the suggested limits of the criminal statute, or is done within the limits, directly or indirectly determined by the science of criminal law, or jurisprudence, but at the same time all variants are equally legitimate and justified. The article provides the results of a regional study of the practice of criminal sentencing with the use of systemic-structural, concrete sociological, statistical methods of scientific cognition, and comparative analysis, analysis of legislation and judicial practice.

CONFLICT OF CRIMINAL LAWS: ANALYTICAL ASPECT

The article considers the institute of operation of a criminal statute in space and by personal scope of application through the prism of conflict regulation. Social relations, established due to the operation of the criminal statute in space and by personal scope of application, as well as the moment of collision between criminal law jurisdictions of different states are the object of the research. The subject matter of the research is: criminal codes of Russia and foreign states, international agreements of a jurisdictional nature. The author pays special attention to jurisdictional rules of the domestic law. In this paper the author uses the following research methods: dialectic, inductive, deductive, and other general scientific and specific scientific methods and ways of scientific knowledge. Special role is assigned to comparative law analysis. The author puts together a doctrine, based on the fundamental principles of the conflicts of laws for the purpose of creating a regulation system for criminal law jurisdictional conflicts. The article covers fundamental principles of the proposed doctrine, considers the structure of the conflicts of law rules and analyzes the current state of legislative regulation of criminal law jurisdiction. The author carries out a detailed comparative analysis of criminal laws in order to determine the most wide spread variants of regulation of criminal law jurisdiction, and proposes recommendations for legislative recognition of the territorial scope of validity of a criminal statute.

Attorney General Bradford’s Opinion and the Alien Tort Statute

In debates over the scope of the Alien Tort Statute (ATS), one historical document has played an especially prominent role. That document is a short opinion by U.S. Attorney General William Bradford, issued in the summer of 1795, concerning the involvement of U.S. citizens in an attack by a French fleet on a British colony in Sierra Leone. In the opinion, Bradford concluded that “[s]o far ... as the transactions complained of originated or took place in a foreign country, they are not within the cognizance of our courts; nor can the actors be legally prosecuted or punished for them by the United States.” He also expressed the view that the actors could be prosecuted for crimes on the high seas, while noting that “some doubt rests on this point” in light of the language of the relevant criminal statute. Finally, he stated—in an obvious reference to the ATS—that there can be no doubt that the company or individuals who have been injured by these acts of hostility have a remedy by a civil suit in the courts of the United States; jurisdiction being expressly given to these courts in all cases where an alien sues for a tort only, in violation of the laws of nations, or a treaty of the United States . . . .The Bradford opinion contains one of the few early historical references to the ATS, so it not surprisingly has received a lot of attention. Numerous academic articles, judicial opinions, and litigation briefs have invoked the Bradford opinion, for a variety of propositions. Reliance on the opinion has increased since the Supreme Court’s 2004 decision in Sosa v. Alvarez-Machain, in which the Court cited the opinion in support of the proposition that the ATS provides jurisdiction over certain common law causes of action derived from the law of nations. As an illustration of its perceived significance, both sides discussed the opinion in the oral argument before the Supreme Court in the first hearing in the pending ATS case, Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum Co.

Continued criminal act in theory and practice

The author describes the concept and elements of the continued criminal act, the continued criminal act as a law construction and legal issue of this act in the proposal of new Criminal Statute.