ON UNDERSTANDING CONTINGENCY IN THE QUALIFICATION OF VIOLENT CRIMES

The article analyzes the practice of interpreting the term «contingency», which is used by the legislatorin the constructions of articles 105, 131 and 132 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation. It is notedthat there is no legal definition of this concept, and law enforcement has not developed common approaches.Possible variants of understanding this term in the compositions of rape and violent acts of a sexual natureare being explored. It is proved that for the purposes of qualifying these crimes, it is impossible to use theapproaches that have developed in the practice of qualifying murders, both because of their inconsistencyand because of the significant differences between these crimes. It is noted that at present there are no initialgrounds for determining the nature of the connection between rape or sexual assault and other grave orespecially grave crimes against a person, which would determine the contingency of these crimes. A numberof qualifying issues have been identified that require resolution in order to form a uniform law enforcementpractice: the impact of the time gap between crimes and the procedure for their commission on qualificationon the basis of their conjugation, the possibility of qualifying as crimes conjugated to each other, providedfor by Art. 131 and 132 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation.