How May Staubtsy Schoolboy Be Punished For Knife Attack?

Lawyers have commented on the situation.

After the attack in Staubtsy, the country’s Investigative Committee opened a criminal case under Part 2 of Art. 139 (Murder) of the Criminal Code. The second part of this article has 16 paragraphs that describe the crime committed. The first one is about the murder of two or more persons. As it is in the Staubtsy case, onliner.by writes.

The Criminal Code lists possible penalties – imprisonment for a term of 8 to 25 years, or life imprisonment, or the death penalty. Naturally, that’s for adults. And what does the law provide for when a teenager under 16 commits the crime?

What does the law say?

The main feature of the current situation is the following: there is such a thing in criminal law as the age of criminal responsibility. The minor is legally liable not for all of the crimes.

– Criminal liability has been established since the age of 14 only for 22 crimes specified in Part 2 of Art. 27 of the Criminal Code of the Republic of Belarus. This includes responsibility for committing crimes under Articles 139, 147, 149 of the Criminal Code (murder, intentional infliction of serious or less serious bodily injury, respectively), – lawyer Tatsiana Ravinskaya says. – The list of these crimes is exhaustive. That is, a child who has reached the age of 14, but who is not yet 16, cannot be held criminally liable for any other crime, not specified in Part 2 of Art. 27 of the Criminal Code.

The criminal code of the country limits the term and the size of punishments for minors compared with the same types of punishments for adults. Some types of punishment can be imposed only under certain conditions.

– The most severe punishment for a minor offender is imprisonment. However, given the special approach to minors, and it has its own specifics. Thus, a person cannot be punished with imprisonment for crimes that do not represent a great public danger. For a less serious crime, the term of punishment varies within 3 years, for a serious one – within 7, for a particularly serious one – within 10 years, – the expert emphasizes.

In the case when a teenager has committed a particularly grave crime involving an intentional infringement on life or drug trafficking, he faces imprisonment up to 12 years.

– At that, if a teenager between the ages of 14 and 16 commits several crimes, including at least one particularly serious crime, the final punishment in the form of imprisonment cannot be imposed for more than 13 years. For minors aged 16 to 18 years, the maximum term of imprisonment under this condition cannot be more than 15 years (Article 116 of the Criminal Code), – the lawyer says.

What happened before?

It is unpleasant, of course, but recently the high-profile trials of teenagers have become more frequent. Here are three examples.

In March 2017, the court announced the verdict to Uladislau Kazakevich, who carried out a massacre in the New Europe shopping center in Minsk in October 2016. At that time, the 17-year-old first-year student gave two blows with a chainsaw to a woman, born in 1973. And after the machinery had died down, he took out a sledgehammer from the guitar case and hit her with it, from which she died at the scene of the incident. Then Kazakevich caused injuries of varying severity to two more women. They remained alive.

The guy was found guilty under:

Part 1 of Art. 13 and Par. 1, 6, 13 of Part 2 of Art. 139 (Preparation for the murder of two or more persons, committed with particular cruelty from molester motives);

Part 1 of Art. 14 and Par. 1, 6, 13, 16 of Part 2 of Art. 139 (The attempted murder of two or more persons, committed with particular cruelty from molester motives, committed by a person who had previously committed the murder);

Par. 6, 13, 16 of Part 2 of Art. 139 (The murder committed with particular cruelty from molester motives, committed by a person who had previously committed the murder);

Part 1 of Art. 339 (hooliganism).

The Minsk resident was sentenced to 15 years in prison, which he was supposed to serve in a general-regime correctional colony. In July of the same year, a meeting was held in the Supreme Court, which considered the case of the attack in the New Europe shopping center on appeal. As a result, the decision of the Minsk City Court was left unchanged.

In May 2018, Kazakevich had another trial. This time, in the case of an attack on the controller of the Shklou colony. Kazakevich was sentenced to 22 years in prison. Of them, 5 years he will spend in prison, the remaining 17 – in the colony of intensified regime.

In April-2017, Minsk ninth-grader Donat Skakun was convicted of attempted murder with a special cruelty of a person performing his official duties (part 1 of article 14, paragraphs 6 and 10 of part 2 of article 139 of the Criminal Code of Belarus). According to the prosecution, the guy inflicted 17 knife wounds in the neck to a teacher of Russian language and literature of the gymnasium No. 74. We remind that the woman survived. The schoolboy was sentenced to 8 years in an educational colony.

In January 2019, the Leninski district court of Minsk sentenced a 14-year-old student of one of the capital's schools. On September 24, the teenager struck his 52-year-old father several times with a knife. The man put up fight, was able to knock out the crime instrument, after which he called an ambulance. His son was convicted of attempted murder of his father. According to Part 1 of Art. 14 and Part 1 of Art. 139 of the Criminal Code, the teenager was punished with imprisonment for a term of 6 years with serving the sentence in the educational colony.