DISCRETION AT THE STAGE OF PRE-TRIAL INVESTIGATION OF CRIMINAL PROCEEDINGS (CURRENT PROBLEMS AND WAYS TO SOLVE THEM)

Abstract

The article is devoted to the issues of discretion of law enforcement entities at the stage of pre-trial investigation of criminal proceedings. The relevance of the proposed study is due to the fact that, on the one hand, discretion is the most controversial form of law enforcement activity, and therefore constantly attracts the attention of researchers, while, on the other hand, in the current era of dynamic social transformations, only discretion is able to minimize the gap between rapid social transformations and the norms that regulate them. Meanwhile, it was found that this phenomenon of law enforcement activity has not been studied sufficiently, especially when it comes to its implementation at the stage of pre-trial investigation in today’s conditions. Therefore, the author tried to fill the outlined gap, and in order to more deeply understand the essence of the stated issues, this scientific investigation was carried out in a philosophical and legal context. The paper analyzes the possibilities of exercising discretion by the investigator, prosecutor, and investigating judge as key participants in the pre-trial investigation, identifies the difficulties that arise when exercising their discretionary powers at this stage of criminal proceedings, and proposes an author’s approach to overcoming them in the paradigm of optimizing domestic legislation to today’s conditions. Applying a number of general scientific methods (analysis, synthesis, generalization, induction, deduction, analogy) and relying on a sociodynamic approach, it was found that current socio-political transformations also prompt modifications to the law enforcement sphere, in particular the need to rethink and improve its discretionary aspect. The leitmotif of the study is the thesis that the dynamic transformations of modern society necessitate the permanent expansion of discretionary powers, primarily at the stage of pretrial investigation. However, to prevent possible subjectivism inherent in such an expansion, the author came to the conclusion that the aforementioned powers should not be reduced, but rather that law enforcement entities should be required to provide thorough reasoning for their discretionary decisions and scrupulously establish the objective (true) circumstances of the case.