The criminal law mechanism for forming a system of physical evidence in criminal cases: issues of comparison

The study presents an overview of opinions on the criminal-legal significance of physical evidence in a criminal case. The identified problems in the formation of a system of physical evidence made it possible to formulate a legislative model of types of physical evidence and their correspondence to specific elements of crimes (a practice-oriented criminal-legal list of physical evidence). Differences in the dispositions of the elements of crimes, located in six sections of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation, imply clear differences in types of objects, documents, traces—objective data indicating the presence (or absence) of elements of a crime. The legal positions of the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation, formulated in the Resolution of June 19, 2023, No. 33-P on the nature of physical evidence, a discrepancy was identified in the provisions of Article 82 of the Criminal Procedure Code of the Russian Federation 'Storage of Physical Evidence,' which do not comply with several articles of the Constitution of the Russian Federation to the extent that these provisions serve as grounds for the destruction of physical evidence in two or more criminal cases. In this regard, in this study, the authors proposed examining the criminal-legal significance of physical evidence from the perspective of the totality of evidence in a criminal case.