Conditional Early Release from Serving a Sentence: Patterns and Problems of Application

Conditional early release from serving a sentence is the traditional and most common type of release from punishment, embodying the ideas of humanism and economy of criminal repression and allowing for a balance between the principles of legality and equality of citizens before the law, on the one hand, and the principle of justice and individualization of criminal responsibility, on the other.

Due to the importance of this institution, the Plenum of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation notes that in the practice of courts there should be no cases of unjustified refusal of conditional early release from serving a sentence of convicts who do not need to fully serve the sentence imposed by the court, and unjustified release from serving a sentence.

Despite the fact that many issues that arise in courts when applying the rules on parole from punishment are resolved in the resolution of the Plenum of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation dated 21 April 2009 No. 8 “On Judicial Practice of conditional early release from serving a sentence, replacement of the unserved part of the sentence with a milder type of punishment”, as well as in the Review of Judicial Practice of conditional early release from serving a sentence (approved by the Presidium of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation on 29.04.2014), nevertheless, as the monitoring of current judicial practice shows, some provisions still cause difficulties in application.

The proposed publication, based on the analysis of the legal positions of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation, sets out specific recommendations for addressing the most pressing issues of the application of parole from serving a sentence, and also assesses the degree of their implementation in judicial practice to ensure its unity.