Pre-trial Criminal Proceedings in the Era of Digitalization: Prospects and Risks

Abstract

Pretrial proceedings in criminal proceedings play an important role in achieving the publicly significant goals of the state — protecting rights and legitimate interests of individuals and organizations that have suffered from crimes, safeguarding individuals from unlawful and unjustified involvement in criminal prosecution, and ensuring the inevitability of holding those guilty of committing a crime criminally liable. It is carried out through the state bodies and officials conducting an investigation into a report of a committed crime and an investigation into a criminal case. Statistical data characterizing the effectiveness of pretrial proceedings indicate an insufficiently high level of their legality and quality, as well as the excessive duration of proceedings in many criminal cases. Russian criminal proceedings are characterized by the duplication of essentially the same procedural actions: conducting an interrogation after obtaining an explanation during the verification of a report about a committed crime, ordering a forensic examination when a specialist’s conclusion on the same subject of expert research is already available, etc. The negative consequences of this include violations of the rights to defense, to access to justice, and to compensation for damage caused by a crime within a reasonable timeframe. At the same time, pretrial proceedings are characterized by significant expenditures of financial, technical, time, and human resources, as well as by complex criminal procedural procedures that do not align with the requirement for the rational use of public funds. The aim of the study is to provide a theoretical, legal, and scientificpractical justification for the need to make more intensive use of modern digital technologies in pretrial proceedings, as well as to clarify the directions and limits of digitalization in the process of verifying reports of a committed crime and conducting preliminary investigation of a criminal case. Research methods: dialectical, content analysis, formal logical, historical legal, systemic, statistical ones. The author’s conclusion is that the goal of pretrial criminal proceedings, in correlation with the required procedural economy and the real protection of the rights of individuals involved in criminal proceedings, may be achieved through the technological modernization of criminal procedural institutions. In turn, this modernization is possible provided that the necessary regulatory framework is created and its organizational, legal, and materialtechnical support is in place.