Purs, A.G. Is the criminal procedural form capable of guaranteeing the right to defense in criminal process?

Abstract: The article reflects the position of the author towards the norms of criminal procedural law based upon the example of the right to defense in the criminal process, which is the foremost important principle of criminal process. The legal basis for the analysis of the legislation in this article is formed by the legislation of the Republic of Belarus (it should be noted that a significant part of the territory of the modern Republic of Belarus was a constituent part of the Russian empire, and currently the legislation is being unified based upon the Union State of Russia and Belarus). The author draws historical and legal parallels between the criminal procedural form typical for the Charter of Criminal Judicial Proceedings of 1864 and the modern legislation. The author attempts to study the norms regulating the guarantees of the right to defense from the standpoint of in-depth structural analysis of criminal procedural norm as a social regulator, its inner structure, moral components and the interrelation between norm-making and legal practice, rather than just construction of the new forms. The methodology is based upon the systemic and structural-functional approaches based upon the modern attitude towards dialectic scientific cognition of objective reality. The author used general scientific methods of cognition, such as induction and deduction, abstraction and modeling, The author offers his interpretation of the verdict of the jury in the case of Vera Zasulich, this case being a vivid example of interaction between a novel form of justice (trial by jury) and the institution of jurors (novel features of the Charter of Criminal Judicial Proceedings of 1864), having formed a dramatically different format for the guarantees of protection of rights of persons brought to criminal responsibility outside the scope of exclusively formal approach. The author substantiates the conclusion on the impossibility of real guarantees of right to defense in the criminal process via improvement of legal technique alone.

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