Forensic Psychological Examination of Affect in Defendants Charged with Multiple Homicides

The article examines the little-studied problem of the practical application of part 2 of Article 107 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation. The rare qualification of the article in multiple murders is due, first of all, to the discrepancy between the expert psychological concept of affect and the concept of sudden strong emotional excitement formulated in the article of the Criminal Code. Secondly, the legislator established a “condition” for the application of privileged articles based solely on provocative actions on the part of the victims. However, in practice, provocation does not always lead to a state of affect; in addition, an affective explosion can be caused by persons who did not become victims, or provoked by an insignificant event that became the “last straw” in cumulative affect. During the forensic psychological examination of affect, the behavior and emotional state of the accused before, during and after the offense are analyzed. It has been established that the following factors are crucial for the occurrence of affect: the subjective nature of the perception of the conflict situation as traumatic, the specific dynamics of the emotional reaction, the personality and cognitive characteristics of the accused, the presence of “pathological soil”, and other significant moments. Thus, in persons with mental abnormalities (within the framework of sanity), one can observe a weighted picture of affect with signs of deep affective narrowing of consciousness, when there is an expansion (irradiation) of affective aggression towards others who accidentally find themselves involved in a traumatic situation. It is proposed to introduce a number of amendments to article 107 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation.