LEGAL, ILLEGAL AND PROCEDURAL INTERESTS OF THE ACCUSED PERSON IN RUSSIAN CRIMINAL PROCEDURE

The paper raises the problem of the theoretical understanding and practical meaning of the category of legal interests of the accused person with the goal of assessing the legality of his/her desire to evade criminal liability. The authors examine scientific approaches to understanding this term in the theory of law and criminal procedure law as well as its correlation with related research categories. The comparative analysis of the concepts "legal" and "illegal interests" allows to consider the following procedural interests to be illegal: the use of spurious arguments; evasion of meetings with the investigator or court appearance; the desire to gain an acquittal while being guilty and fully exposed; receiving an unreasonably light punishment for the committed crime; false denial of the committed crime; the desire to use justice for slander, conviction of an innocent person out of revenge for lawful actions; defamation of another person. At the same time, not all criminal court procedure scholars consider that the interest of the accused person to evade criminal liability is illegal; some believe that the legitimacy of this interest is supported by the presumption of innocence. The authors of this paper think that it would be more correct to assess the interests of the accused person in the criminal court procedure not from the standpoint of their abstract legitimacy or illegitimacy, but rather depending on their criminal procedure admissibility, so they suggest evaluating the interests of the accused from the scientific point of view as procedural interests. Procedural interests of the accused form a system consisting of the basic procedural interest and procedural subinterests. A systemic analysis of the Criminal Procedure Code of the Russian Federation allows the authors to state that it includes a mechanism (although a disconnected one) for ensuring the procedural interests of the accused and it is manifested through specific procedural guarantees. However, until the interests of the accused acquire an independent procedural form in the criminal case materials, the efficiency of their protection in criminal court procedure will remain questionable.