The emergence, development and functioning of the institution of exemption from criminal liability is characterized by several patterns. Their identification and description is the key to understanding its essence, evolution and current state. Despite numerous studies on the institution of exemption from criminal liability, no attempt has been made yet to study its socio-legal nature through patterns, which necessitates the conduct of this study. The work is based on the theoretical doctrines on social, historical, and criminological conditions of criminal law and criminal policy that have become established in Russian science. The authors adhere to a dialectical view on the development of criminal law and its institutions, which involves the identification and study of the underlying contradictions of social and legal development. To study the laws of development and functioning of the institution of exemption from criminal liability, historical, statistical, analytical, and documentary methods are used. The paper identifies and analyzes the patterns of the institution of exemption from criminal liability, characterizing: the humanization of criminal law; the development of criminal law as a means of social management; the conditionality of the content of criminal law norms by social behavior of people; the dependence of the type of settlement of criminal conflict on the concept of the relationship between the state and the individual in society; the socio-historical genesis of the institution of exemption from responsibility; trends in the internal development of the institution of exemption from criminal liability and its functioning in practice. According to the results of the analysis, the authors conclude that the institution of exemption from criminal liability, which naturally emerged and develops as a humanistic response to the shortcomings and costs of criminal punishment, aimed at correcting lowrisk criminals and compensation for harm caused by a crime, now functions as a dialectic opposite of the legislative trend of increasing the scale of criminalization, an intrasystem criminal law mechanism to deter and overcome criminalization redundancy of the criminal law, which distorts its social and legal nature and purpose.