HUKUKA GİRİŞ

According to prevailing legal theories, the general purpose of criminal law is the protection of certain individual and collective interests. The threat of punishment is expected to deter potential violators from committing offenses; the general purpose of criminal law is thus to prevent crime. Whenever someone has nevertheless committed a criminal act and the issue of punishing that person arises, the main purpose of imposing a criminal sanction is not preventive but retributive. On the basis of these arguments, it is said that theories of punishment regarding the purposes of criminal law, are divided into absolute and relative theories. Absolute theories look back to the past and relative theories look to the future. The difference of the theories arise from the difference between the punishment and prevention perspectives. So, the correct answer is given in option A.

In order to criminalize the behaviours, two leading phenomenon is governed by states by exercising the criminal law power in particular: The harm principle in Anglo-American Law and the Legal Good (Rechtsgut) principle particularly in German Law and civil law (continental law). Namely, the correct answer is option C.

Criminal law looks back to the past. This is a logical and necessary consequence of principles deriving from the age of enlightenment, in which a scholar by the name Feuerbach first wrote the legality principle ‘Nulle Poena Sine Lege, Nullum Crimen Sine Lege,’ which states that an act may only be punished if criminal liability had been established by law before the act was committed. The correct answer is E.

As a fundamental principle, ‘No Punishment Without Law’ is regulated under most state constitutions, Criminal Codes and supranational Treaties including the ECHR. The ECHR, with its Article 7, defines the principle as ‘No one shall be held guilty of any criminal offense on account of any act or omission which did not constitute a criminal offense under national or international law at the time when it was committed. Nor shall a heavier penalty be imposed than the one that was applicable at the time the criminal offense was committed.’ According to this, the correct answer is B.

The subjective element- also called the mental element- in crime is one of the most significant concepts of substantive criminal law. In general terms, an accused is held liable only if he/she has mens rea. Mens rea is the state of mind or, in the case of negligence, the failure to attain a certain standart of behaviour which the offense definition requires before the accused can be convicted. The Latin for ‘guilty mind’, ‘mens rea’ refers to the notion according to which a court should not find a person guilty of a crime unless he/she has a blameworthy state of mind. The philosophical foundation for mens rea is that the accused can control his conducts, including whether to engage in the conducts breaking criminal law. So, the correct answer is D.

Indirect principal refers to committing the offense through another person who conducts the criminal act. Another person –the agent– becomes an instrument while committing the offense. The indirect principal exercises control over the offense through the agent who directly commits the crime. Namely, the correct answer is B.

Anglo-American criminal law distinguishes between two aspects of the causation analysis: Factual cause and legal (or proximate) cause. Factual cause is “but-for cause”, meaning that “the conduct is the cause of the result when it is an antecedent but for which the result in question would not have occurred.” In contrast, factual cause is rarely discussed; almost all causation cases are concerned with legal or proximate cause: “The relationship between the conduct and result satisfies any additional causal requirements imposed by the Code or by the law defining the offense. The correct answer is given in option C.

Apart from the examples mentioned above, jurisdiction has accepted necessity in the following cases:
• criminal trespass by police informers into the house of a suspect for the purpose of uncovering facts about drug offenses,
• leaving the scene of an accident in order to avoid physical abuse,
• disturbing the peace of the dead by performing an organ transplant if the consent of the relatives could not be obtained, or by taking a blood sample from a deceased accident victim for the purposes of excluding drunkenness in the context of potential insurance claims,
• violation of the privacy of the spoken word by making secret phone recordings for the purpose of using them in civil or family proceedings,
• or to prove the bias of a judge in a criminal case for the purpose of recusing him,
• taking away someone’s car key to prevent him from driving whilst drunk.

According to these information, the correct answer is E.