Foreword

The article touches upon the issue of internal transparency of rehabilitation proceedings and reinvestigations which take place following the annulment of the final judgment. Depending on the rehabilitation prerequisites, it is possible to obtain an acquittal or a judgment equal to an acquittal in three exceptional and appeal modes, i.e. cassation, revision and annulment with regard to persons who experienced repression on the grounds of their involvement in actions aimed at maintaining the independence of the Republic of Poland. The full inclusion of the defendant and their defender in the court proceedings guarantees that the efforts to expunge the defendant’s criminal record will be carried out in accordance with the rules of directness, contradictoriness, equality, orality,
the right to defense and broadly understood rule of conscientiousness. This type of procedure upholds the possibility of voluntary participation of the defendant in proceedings aimed at establishing the probability or certainty of the emergence of grounds for employing exceptional appeal modes, while the restrictions, exclusion or expansion of the involvement of the defendant are regulated according to particular exceptions.

The following article aims at discussing the attributes of the directness of attack and the commensurateness of the means of necessary self-defense, which constitute the most significant, but also the most controversial, prerequisites for the justification of necessary self-defense. The author conducts his study on the basis of selected case law of appeal courts and the Supreme court, dating back four years. In this way, the article allows to delineate the limits of necessary self-defense, as well as present particular cases of exceeding the limits of necessary self-defense.

The legal assessment of misappropriation of property belonging to community property by one of the spouses constitutes a heavily contested issue in criminal law. The article analyzes a well-established opinion, according to which such property can be the object of the crime of misappropriation, and which cites the rules of the civil law. The article focuses on the issue of the possibility of assuming in such cases an attack on property, i.e. a violation of the object of the offence, discussed from the perspective of family law, which allows spouses to dispose of such property without the permission of the other spouse, on the basis of the rule of independent property management. Moreover, the author verifies the prerequisite for the seizure of third-party property, given that the property in question belongs also to the defendant, in accordance with the rules of community property. In addition to that, the author discusses the issue of meeting the prerequisites for the subjective aspect and the rule for evaluating the damage inflicted by the offence. The latter issue has been identified as particularly controversial, given that determining the scope of the possible restitution claims according to the value of property which constitutes the object of the offence in a situation where the property belongs also to the defendant is contrary to the intuition of criminal law scholars.

The main aim of the article is to discuss the issue of the liability of an editor for a press offence, according to Article 49a of the press law. The analysis begins with a historical overview which shows the evolution of liability for offences committed in print by press outlets. To this end, the author introduces the concepts of the right of anonymity or the responsible editor. These two institutions, characteristic of the interwar period, performed two extremely different functions. The former allowed to conceal the identity of the author of the printed material, while the latter was instituted in order to ensure that the victims were sufficiently protected. The analysis of the current provisions of the press law showed that the legislator introduced two separate legal definitions: that of an editor and that of an editor in chief. The following part of the article discusses those two categories in more detail, paying particular attention to the decoding of their definitions as introduced in the press law from a practical standpoint. Moreover, it has been emphasized that each editor in chief is also
an editor, but not vice versa, since some regulations are addressed specifically to the editor in chief. Bearing in mind that assigning liability for a press offence is dependent on determining the moment from which a person can be considered an editor in chief, the author discusses the registration system for journals and periodicals. As a result, the author determines three distinct periods of time which determine the possibility of considering a particular person as an editor in chief. The last part of the article is devoted to the rules and circumstances of prosecution of the editor for publishing a press article. The author points to the differences which stem from assuming a different subject party of the offence. In the cases of assuming negligence, it results in liability under Article 49a of the press law, whereas in the cases of assuming intentionality results in liability for an intentional offence of another type committed in complicity.

The subject of this article is nomenclatural interpretation of the notions of “a person of interest”, “a suspect” and “a defendant” in Polish Code of Criminal
Procedure – the parties in criminal proceedings who are suspected of committing a crime or who are charged with a crime. The article discusses the legal definitions of the word “suspect” according to Article 71 § 1 of the Code of Criminal Procedure (i.e. a person against whom a statement of objections has been issued and a person who has been charged on the grounds of examination of the person in question as a suspect) as well as the word “defendant” according to Article 71 § 2 and 3 of the Code of Criminal Procedure (sensu stricto and sensu largo). Moreover, the article provides an overview of the available
definitions of “a suspect” and “a person of interest” – parties named directly in the Code of Criminal Procedure. In addition to that, the article discusses the notion of “actual suspect” (whose definition and understanding varies in the doctrine), which emerged from the previously effective Code of Criminal Procedure. The article analyses the legal standing of such an “actual suspect” in the context of Article 233 § 1a of the Criminal Code (a regulation which is
considered potentially unconstitutional). While discussing the figure of the “suspect”, the author analyzes terms such as “issuing” and “preparation” – in connection with Article 71 § 1 and 313 § 1 of the Criminal Code and the lack of agreement within the discipline regarding the precise time at which the
statement of objections has been issued (which is connected with obtaining the position of the passive party to proceedings in criminal procedure).
Moreover, the article discusses in some detail the legal standing of a person against which a motion has been presented, according to Article 354 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, regarding the discontinuation of proceedings and issuing preventive measures protecting the person of an insane perpetrator – in the context of nomenclature.

The aim of the following article is to consider the possibility of accepting the admission of guilt by the defendant as the primary condition for conclusion of the court proceedings in all consensual modes of trial as delineated by the Code of Criminal Procedure. The article contests the validity of the criterion of the seriousness of the act, which has been established by the legislator for the purposes of distinguishing a separate consensual model of court proceedings. At the same time, the article aims to consider whether it would be more reasonable to broaden the possibility of plea bargaining to include all cases, regardless of the seriousness of the act, if the defendant pleads guilty. Moreover, the author considers the prerequisites for sentencing without court proceedings, provided for under Article 335 § 1 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, including the assessment of the defendant’s own account in the context of all evidence collected in the investigation.

The following article critically assesses the ruling of seven justices of the Supreme Court dating January 19, 2017. The crucial issue undertaken by this article consists in the assessment of the validity of the ruling of the Supreme Court which assumes an unsuccessful attempt in the cases of the lack of an object on which to commit a criminal offense and defines the “voluntariness” of active grief exhibited at the stage of attempting to commit a criminal offense. The Supreme Court assumed an objectivist conception in their interpretation of the phrase “lack of an object on which to commit a criminal offense”, thus assuming that what transpires is a successful attempt in the case where there was a lack of a particular object comprising the perpetrator’s intent, but there were other objects which could have become the objects of the crime. At the same time, however, the Supreme Court ruled that the premises of voluntariness resulting in impunity (Article 15 § 1 of the Criminal Code) did not apply, since the perpetrator did not abandon his intent to commit a criminal offense; it was only the object of it that did not fulfill their expectations. According to the author of the article, such a ruling allows to reach two contradictory conclusions. Thus, the author proposes a different conception of assuming successful or unsuccessful attempt with regard to an object on which to commit a criminal offense, as well as a model for assessing the voluntariness of the perpetrator in the cases of the lack of continuation of iter delicti.

The aim of the following article is to discuss the issues of the power of the prosecutor to reveal information pertaining to ongoing preparatory proceedings in the light of the new regulations determined by Article 12 of the Act of January 28, 2016, the Law on the Prosecutor’s Office. The aforementioned regulation constitutes an important exception to the general rule of confidentiality of preparatory proceedings, which heavily informs the scope of the analysis. Moreover, the author discusses the relationship between Article 12 of the Law on the Prosecutor’s Office and earlier regulations regarding the revealing of information regarding preparatory proceedings included in the following acts: press law, law on access to public information, personal data protection act, supplemented with relevant regulations of the Criminal Code and Code of Criminal Procedure. In addition, the author discusses the consequences of the analyzed regulation for the interest of the criminal justice system, the interest of the public, as well as the interest of the parties in the proceedings, which has allowed her to assess the justification for that regulation and the necessity of implementing it in Polish legal system.

The author discusses the problem of excessive normative production in Polish legal system on the example of the changes implemented by amending the Code of Criminal Procedure. The article presents the changes implemented in the particular codes of criminal proceedings, starting with the first code of the independent Poland, the Code of 1928, followed by the amendments to that code, which remained in effect until December 31, 1969, as well as modified normative solutions remaining in effect prior to the change of the political and economic system, and concluding with the Code of Criminal Procedure which came into force on September 1, 1998. Such comparative study of the activity of the Polish Parliament between 1928 and 2017 reveals a severe excessive normative production with regard to criminal law in the recent years. The author argues that any normative changes to code regulations should be implemented only once the regulations subject to change have been tested in practice and have undergone an in-depth discussion in all groups that use the modified norms. As a positive example, the author enumerates the efforts of the Codification Commission of the Criminal Law, which resulted in the amendment of September, 2013, and compares it with the procedure of amending the Code of Criminal Procedure in March, 2016.

In the doctrine of criminal law, the term “qualified attempt” denotes two cases. Firstly, the term “qualified attempt” describes a situation in which, when the perpetrator, in their intent to commit a criminal act, directly aims to commit it but does not succeed (attempt), while fulfilling all premises of another criminal act (commission). In the second case, the term “qualified attempt” describes a situation in which the attempt at the commission of a criminal act is covered by the impunity clause on the basis of active grief, while the act of the perpetrator needs to be classified as a commission of a different criminal act. The article, following a general overview of the literature on the subject, presents the author’s own understanding of the term “qualified attempt”, which consists
in the differentiation among attempt, cumulatively qualified attempt with commission, and non-punishable attempt subsumed as a punishable commission.

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