Under public danger in criminal law is meant one of the main signs of a crime - damage. It can be caused both by the constitutional rights of citizens (including the most important right to life), and the security of the state, its economic interests, public order, ecology, morality.
Instruction manual
1
Some lawyers believe that public danger is an inherent sign of less dangerous offenses than damage that is punishable not in criminal but in administrative order.
2
What is the specificity of the public danger of crime? Different types of crimes differ from each other in severity and, accordingly, in public danger. It is clear even to an inexperienced person in jurisprudence that robbery is a more dangerous crime than, for example, theft or hooliganism. A murder committed without extenuating circumstances is a much more dangerous crime than the same robbery. Therefore, the severity of responsibility for crimes of different social danger must also be different. This is directly stated in part 3 of article 60 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation: "The nature and degree of public danger of a crime is taken into account when imposing a sentence."
3
It is the degree of public danger that is one of the main factors that allows us to differentiate crimes into “simple”, “with aggravating circumstances” and “with extenuating circumstances”. And in order to assess the degree of danger and, accordingly, assign a crime to one of the above categories, it is necessary to take into account a number of factors: the object of the crime, the amount of damage caused, the motivation of the offender, the degree of his guilt (if the crime was committed by a group of persons), etc. An accurate assessment of the degree of public danger can be given only after a thorough study of all these factors, as well as taking into account mitigating or aggravating circumstances.
4
In what cases does the public danger of a crime not entail criminal liability? Article 77 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation provides that a person who has committed a crime may be exempted from criminal liability if either that person or the act committed by him has ceased to be socially dangerous. Similar rules exist in the criminal law of many other countries. This happens if criminal law is “lagging behind” the realities of life, and acts, which were recently considered socially dangerous, are now firmly included in the life of a large majority of society. For example, in the last years of the existence of the USSR, norms were still in effect that punished for speculating or buying and selling foreign currency. In reality, they looked at it through their fingers, and in rare cases, if the case nevertheless reached the court, the accused were exonerated.
