The organization “Young Barristers” considers the initiative of addition of the verdicts, found in Code of Criminal Procedure, and addresses Georgian Ministry of Justice with proposal, in case of new regulations, to pay attention to exclusion of the negative consequences while implementation of such matter. 

From the statement of „Young Barristers“-s lawyer, Ana Kiknadze, legislative initiative should come up with precise regulation, which will determine the inevitable criteria for court authorities. In particular, it must become clear, under which circumstances can the judge use the right to add or substract the verdict. It is important, to have differentiable approach to the categories of crimes, because judge should not be the only with discriminative power of addition or subtraction of verdict.  

According to the organization’s evaluations, during the process of reviewing new initiative, next factors are to kept in mind:

• Presented initiative significantly increases judge’s authority, and the trust from society towards court is not as solid to fully exclude other precendents of justice during coming up with verdict.
• In the process of substantiation of new iniciative, it is to be noticed the practical difficulities and problems of “unconstrained addition of the verdicts” and “unconstrained substraction of the verdicts”, so that the crime will neither be over-simplifyed, nor overloaded.

„Young Barristers“ share the position, according to which, principle of unconstrainted substraction of verdict is as incomplete, as principle of unconstrained addition of verdict, because in neither of the cases happens fixing of the final verdict from case’s circumstances, culprit’s personality and the danger of the given deeds. In adition, principle of unconstrainted substraction of the verdict may push the culprit from one crime to the second and third, because he/she will know that it is the heaviest crime he/she will be trialed for and the heaviest crime will engulf the verdicts of all the other ones. Accordingly, the objective of presented proposal is to restore the alternative approach and even in the case of addition of verdicts, to settle the maximum limit.

For the information: according legislative changes in 2006, it was stated that in any circumstances, in the case of aggregate crimes, the final verdict would have been the sum of the individual ones. These changes originated a cold blooded legislative politics, which is also known as “zero tolerance”. In 2013, unconstrained addition of verdicts was partially neglected and the priority became the new regulations of engulfment of verdicts. A new initiative was proposed by Ministry of Justice in 2014, according to which: “during the aggregate crimes, the final verdict will engulf less severe or crime of the same size or verdicts will partially or fully add up. In case of partial or full addition of verdicts, the final verdict should not be more than full and sum of the halves of the heaviest verdicts”.