Qualification and investigation of crimes motivated by jealousy, hatred, and enmity

Abstract

The article is devoted to a comprehensive study of the criminal law, criminological and criminalistic aspects of combating crimes motivated by hatred, jealousy, or enmity. The background of the study is high statistical indicators that reflect the wide prevalence of the considered motives for committing crimes. At the same time, the article, for the first time, conducts a comprehensive study that examines these crimes and countering them from various sides. The objective of the study is to analyze the current state and develop current recommendations for considering factors of jealousy, hatred, or enmity in the qualification of acts, the development of criminological and criminalistic measures to counteract these crimes, as well as criminalistic programs and algorithms for the investigation of a group of crimes committed on the grounds of hatred, jealousy, or enmity. The methodology is based on the universal dialectical cognitive method. Besides, the authors used specific scientific methods: comparative-legal, hermeneutical, and logical methods, which ensure compliance with the general principles of scientific knowledge. The study is based on a systematic approach. The research novelty is due to the authors’ non-trivial approach, which combines the achievements of criminal law, criminology, and criminalistics and develops a single set of issues based on this symbiosis of knowledge. As a conclusion, it is noted that the specifics of the qualification of crimes motivated by jealousy, hatred, and enmity depend not only on the internal emotional state of the person committing them but also on the external conditions in which the subjective attitude of the perpetrator towards the committed act is formed. It is necessary to develop recommendations for practitioners containing rules for the qualification of crimes in the competition of criminal law norms, in which to provide answers to questions related to typical errors in the qualification of crimes and to offer an interpretation of the evaluation categories, the application of which causes the most significant difficulty in practice. The paper presents the algorithms of the two main investigation programs developed based on the selected investigative situations.