On the Concept of Criminal Record and its Institutional Significance

Abstract

One of the directions of the generalizing definition of the criminal record (In addition to the institutional one) is the attribution of its nature to the class of legal facts. A criminal record is an urgent legal fact of conviction for a crime committed by a person (the fact of a single act or a fact-state), expressed in a court verdict of conviction with sentencing, entailing criminal and general legal consequences for the convicted person. When a criminal record has the value of a qualifying attribute of the corpus delicti, or is taken into account as a sign of recidivism of crimes when sentencing, as well as in all other cases when it affects the application of certain articles of the Criminal Code, a criminal record acts as a fact of a single action (it is taken into account only when a person is convicted of committing a new crime and he is punished by a guilty verdict of the court).

The conviction and punishment of a person by a court verdict, being a fact of a single action, entails the emergence of a legal fact of continuous action (condition) of having a criminal record.