An apparent ideal concurrence is a situation where an offender in committing two or more offences which are neither temporally or spatially connected satisfies the requirement for the existence of the legal elements of or prohibited consequences of two or more criminal offences and is tried for all such offences at the same time, and due to the apparent concurrence between the committed criminal offences his criminal responsibility is limited to only one offence.
It is an institute that has been developed through case law through history, and today one of the forms of an apparent ideal concurrence is regulated by law (continued criminal offence in Article 54 of the Criminal Code). The apparent concurrence occurs due to the fact that both the flawed law and the culpability of the offender are fully covered in a single criminal offence so it is not necessary to punish him for other committed criminal offences. Despite the formal fulfilment of the requirement for the existence of the legal elements or the prohibited consequences of two or more criminal offences, there is only one substantive justification for punishment, due to the fact that the committed criminal offences constitute a single violation of criminal law.
The master's thesis will present in more detail all forms of apparent ideal concurrence (compounded criminal offence, unpunished previous criminal offence, unpunished subsequent criminal offence, collective criminal offence, and continuing criminal offence), both from the theoretical point of view and the perspective of case law. A compounded criminal offence is a special type of criminal offence as it consists of two or more separate criminal offences. In the cases of unpunished previous and subsequent criminal offences, this means individual stages of criminal offences remain unpunished because of the full sum of the flawed law and culpability is covered under the main criminal offence. A collective criminal offence is defined as premeditated activity of the offender, which consists of repeated similar acts, provided that the subjective attitude of the offender is also proven, which connects these acts into a whole. A continuing criminal offence consists of two or more simultaneous or subsequent misdemeanours or aggravated inclinations of committed or attempted crimes against property, which depending on the place, manner or other circumstances, constitute a single activity.
The individual relationships between criminal offences (speciality, subsidiarity, consumption, and inclusion), created and developed through case law, which give rise to the apparent concurrence, will also be discussed. The institute of continuing criminal offence will also be compared with the Serbian “extended criminal offence.” The notion of uniformity of conduct will also be presented, which represents a key instrument to distinguish between ideal and true concurrence but which in practice does not have any major significance. At the end of the thesis, the influence of concurrence on the sentence itself will be discussed.
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