Traffic accident crime is a typical, common and frequent type of crime in daily life, and traffic accident cases with escape situation are the focus of social attention and the difficulty of judicial authorities in handling such cases.
In judicial practice, the determination of accident responsibility made by the public security traffic management department has in fact become the main basis for judicial organs to convict and sentence cases, and in a certain sense, this has caused the drawback of "kidnapping" judicial power by administrative power in the process of handling such cases.
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«——[·Case Situation.]——»
At about 8 p.m. on May 28, 2012, farmer Zhang drove his farm tractor carrying coal on a township road without a license.
Because the weather was dark, the road conditions were not good, the road section was more downhill, and Zhang drove slower. In the process of going downhill, there was a sudden "bang" sound behind Zhang's car, Zhang drove out for a while before stopping, and after getting out of the car to check, he found that there was a large amount of blood on the rear of his vehicle, and a motorcycle was upside down on the side of the road not far away.
Zhang realized that a motorcycle rear-ended and hit the rear of his tractor, a traffic accident occurred, and Zhang immediately drove away from the scene of the accident for fear of taking responsibility.
The next day, Zhang was arrested by the public security traffic police department. It was later found out that farmer Ding was drinking at a friend's house that night, and after getting drunk, he drove his motorcycle home without a license, because he was drunk and confused, the speed was fast, and he did not keep an appropriate distance from the car in front, and when he went downhill, he rear-ended and hit the rear of the vehicle driven by Zhang.
About 5 minutes after Zhang fled the scene of the accident, Wang, a passer-by passing here, sent Ding to the hospital for rescue, and Ding died due to his injuries after ineffective rescue.
After ascertaining the above facts, the public security traffic police department issued a certificate of responsibility for the traffic accident and determined that Zhang was driving without a license and escaping after the traffic accident, which played a major role in the occurrence of the accident and assumed full responsibility for the accident. The deceased Ding was not responsible for the accident.
"Escape" alone cannot constitute the crime of causing a traffic accident, and can only be subordinate to the act of causing a traffic accident under specific circumstances to have the significance of constituting the crime of traffic accident
The act of "escape" in itself does not constitute a traffic accident crime on its own. In terms of the time at which the act is made, "escape" is the subsequent act of the act of causing a traffic accident.
Committed after the occurrence of a traffic accident and the harmful result, which is obviously later than the harmful result, the act itself has not independently reached the degree of social harm worthy of punishment, that is, the crime of causing a traffic accident is not established, mainly due to the restriction of the principle of legality of crime.
Article 3 of the Criminal Law stipulates: "Whoever is expressly prescribed by law as a crime shall be convicted and punished in accordance with the law; Where the law does not expressly provide for an offence, it shall not be convicted and punished. ”
Some countries (regions) outside the region, such as Japan and Taiwan, have established a separate crime of hit-and-run traffic in their criminal law, and the act of fleeing after a traffic accident can be independently criminalized.
The mainland criminal law does not establish a separate crime of traffic hit-and-run, and there is no provision in the crime system for traffic hit-and-run to independently constitute the crime of traffic accident.
It is only a serious administrative violation and should be subject to corresponding administrative punishments. There is no criminal law causal relationship between "escape" and the result of the accident.
The causal relationship in criminal law is the conditional relationship between the act and the harmful result that "without the former, there is no latter", which is a relationship between causing and being caused.
Behavior causes the result, the behavior comes first, the result comes last, and the behavior is the cause of the result. However, as analyzed above, there is no doubt that the escape behavior begins after the accident hazard result occurs, and certainly cannot lead to the hazard result.
Therefore, it is difficult to establish a criminal law causal relationship between "escape" and the result of the accident hazard, and the escape behavior does not need to bear responsibility for the result of the accident hazard.
In other words, the act of escape did not cause a harmful result as a necessary element of the crime of causing a traffic accident, and without a harmful result, there was no criminal act, and of course the criminal responsibility for the escape behavior cannot be implicated.
Absence of subjective negligence. As a common crime of negligence, the crime of traffic accident is a subjective form of negligence in the form of negligence, including negligence and overconfidence.
The division of responsibility for accidents by the public security traffic management department does not consider the subjective aspects of the perpetrator, and cannot reflect the subjective form of the crime of causing traffic accidents.
For the harmful results that have occurred, the perpetrator has no duty of care when fleeing, nor can he foresee the occurrence of the harmful results of the accident, and there is no objective possibility of taking active measures to avoid the occurrence of the results for the established facts, so it is impossible to talk about the subjective negligence of the actor on the harmful results.
Without the subjective constituent elements for establishing a crime, the perpetrator's escape behavior certainly cannot constitute the crime of causing a traffic accident. Based on the above three reasons, the act of "escape" itself cannot be established as a traffic accident alone, otherwise it will certainly violate the principle of criminal law and crime, damage the authority of criminal law, and infringe upon the legitimate rights and interests of those who escape.
The legal connotation and application conditions of "flight after a transportation accident"
According to Article 133 of the Criminal Law, the Criminal Law sets out three types of crimes and three corresponding statutory penalties for the crime of causing traffic accidents. When the act of causing a traffic accident in advance constitutes a traffic accident crime, but there is no escape, or although there is an escape but has been evaluated among the basic offenders of the traffic accident crime, the minimum sentencing range of this crime shall apply;
When the perpetrator's prior traffic accident has constituted a traffic accident crime and there is a situation of escape, it meets the conditions for upgrading the statutory sentence for the crime of traffic accident, and the statutory penalty is increased by one level on the basis of the punishment of the above-mentioned basic offense;
When the perpetrator's traffic accident has constituted the crime of traffic accident, and the condition of "death due to escape" is met, the sentencing range of more than seven years of fixed-term imprisonment shall apply.
These three levels of crime and the corresponding statutory punishment are progressively progressive and complement each other and conform to the logical system of punishment. The legal connotations and application conditions of the two sentencing conditions of "flight after a traffic accident" and "death caused by escape" in this article shall be understood and evaluated separately.
The Criminal Law regards "fleeing after a transportation accident" as an aggravating circumstance for the perpetrator, and its criminal responsibility is mainly based on the social harm of the act and the subjective malignancy of the perpetrator.
After the accident, the perpetrator fled to evade legal prosecution, causing the harm of the accident to be in the danger of expanding indefinitely, which undoubtedly has serious social harm and also shows the subjective malignancy of the perpetrator's disregard for life.
The Criminal Law lists "escape after a traffic accident" and "other particularly egregious circumstances" as aggravating circumstances of the same statutory range of punishment.
It indicates that "escape" and Article 4 of the "Interpretation" stipulates that "if two or more people die or more people are seriously injured, they shall bear full or main responsibility for the accident; If more than six people die, they shall be equally responsible for the accident; Causing direct damage to public property or other people's property, bearing full or primary responsibility for the accident, and unable to compensate for an amount of more than 600,000 yuan"
The social harm of the three types of particularly egregious circumstances is commensurate, and their criminal responsibility should be increased so as to achieve proportionality between criminal responsibility and punishment.
As one of the aggravating circumstances of punishment provided for in the Criminal Law, "fleeing after a traffic accident" should strictly control the conditions for its application: The perpetrator's prior traffic accident has independently constituted the crime of traffic accident.
This is the basis for the perpetrator's "escape" to lead to the escalation of the statutory sentence, and if the perpetrator's prior traffic accident behavior is not sufficient to constitute the crime of traffic accident, it is impossible to increase the punishment.
The existence of the perpetrator's act of fleeing after a traffic accident means that the perpetrator who has already constituted the crime of causing a traffic accident flees after the accident to avoid legal prosecution.
Repeated evaluation of "escape" episodes. In the special case of a traffic accident causing serious injury to more than one person, and the accident bears full or primary responsibility for the accident, "escape" has been evaluated as a constituent element of the crime of the basic crime, in this type of traffic accident case.
If flight is again taken as an aggravating condition for punishment, the same escape will be regarded as both a conviction circumstance and a sentencing circumstance, which violates the principle of prohibiting duplicate evaluation in criminal law.
Therefore, where the act of escaping has already been evaluated as an element of the crime of causing a traffic accident, it must no longer be used as a sentencing circumstance to give the perpetrator an aggravated punishment.
«——[·Epilogue.]——»
There is a criminal law causal relationship between the traffic accident and the result of the accident injury, which is the objective basis for the perpetrator to bear criminal responsibility.
In practice, situations such as driving without a license, overloading, and driving a defective vehicle are potential hidden dangers of accidents, and do not necessarily have a criminal law causal relationship with the occurrence of accidents and the results of casualties.
Only when the perpetrator's traffic accident behavior provides the force, causal force, and the conditional relationship between the accident and the result of the accident can the existence of a criminal law causal relationship be determined and then investigated for criminal responsibility.
The conviction and sentencing of the crime of causing a traffic accident shall strictly follow the elements of the crime and the sentencing circumstances stipulated in the Criminal Law, and conduct substantive value analysis and judgment of the conduct of the parties involved in the traffic accident, rather than simply directly adopting the determination of accident responsibility made by the public security traffic management department.
Only by strictly distinguishing responsibilities and adhering to the principle of legality can crimes be accurately identified.
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