On law enforcement discretion in the court's assessment of evidence in a legal case

Abstract

In this article, a detailed analysis of the term "judicial discretion" has been carried out. From the totality of the positions of legal scholars studied, a narrow conclusion was made that judicial discretion is a subjective right to a limited variability of actions. Regarding the differentiation of the terms "judicial discretion" and "judicial discretion", the conclusion was formulated that the authorized subject of judicial discretion, as well as judicial, will always be a court represented by a judge. Consequently, for the purposes of this article, these concepts were used as synonyms, since, according to the authors, there are no reasonable grounds for their differentiation. Investigating the issue of judicial discretion when assessing evidence by the court in civil cases, an argument was formulated that in law enforcement practice it is traced that the specifics of each civil case are individual and it is impossible to provide all the details of any particular case in the legal norms. It is at this stage that the limited freedom of the court opens up when forming internal attitudes in a particular legal case, and, in particular, for the application of judicial discretion. Studying the problem of judicial discretion in the process of evaluating evidence by the court, it was impossible not to see its connection with the judge's inner conviction. The authors concluded that it is the judge's inner conviction that will play a primary role in the court's assessment of evidence. The article formulated the position that in terms of the court's assessment of evidence, a certain "limit" of judicial discretion is the requirement of procedural codes that the motivational part of the court's decision should indicate the reasons for which the court rejected certain evidence. Thus, applying judicial discretion, the judge is in any case obliged to motivate the adoption of such a decision and justify the choice of this option, in no way going beyond the scope of a specific legal case in his conclusions. According to the results of the study of specific examples from judicial practice, it became clear that the ambiguity in determining the motives for which the court made a particular decision entails an appeal of judicial acts, and, subsequently, their cancellation, which negatively affects statistics and belittles the authority of the judicial system. It follows from this that the gaps in legislative regulation in terms of the categories studied in this article have long been in need of filling. The diversity of the interpretation of concepts leads to a kind of "thinking out" and the lack of unity in the application of these categories in practice. In the absence of achieving legal consolidation of the content of these concepts and their boundaries, there will always be a risk of going beyond their limits, which each specific subject will determine independently.