The topic of this thesis relates to the equity factor advanced age which is set forth in Section 5.2 of Chapter 29 of the Swedish Penal Code. According to this equity factor, the court shall give reasonable consideration when determining the appropriate punishment to whether the accused in consequence of advanced age would suffer unreasonable hardship by a punishment imposed in accordance with the penal value of the crime.[1] If the court reaches the conclusion that this might be the case, the sentence should be mitigated. This mitigation can happen either through reducing the sanction or by choosing a less intervening punishment than prison, according to Section 4 in Chapter 30 of the Swedish Penal Code. When deciding what an appropriate punishment should be due to the advanced age, the court also has to take some other circumstances into account, such as whether it is a matter of recidivism, if the crime is considered to be of a special type and if the penal value is high or low. The purpose of this thesis is to establish when and how the court should consider an accused’s advanced age. Furthermore, the thesis also aims to establish why advanced age is a mitigating circumstance when deciding within the Swedish penal system. To achieve with answering this, the essay accounts for all the, according to established law, different circumstances which influence the possibility to take the criminal offender’s high age into account, to establish what is the law. The analysis is conducted through the application of a legal dogmatic approach. To fully examine the equity factor advanced age the thesis describes the course of action which the court has to follow when determining punishment and the choice of sanction. It also describes and analyzes the regulation of equity factors and why they are considered when determining a punishment or choosing a sanction. Furthermore, there are several elements regarding the equity factor advanced age which are not stated in the law. Because of this, the thesis analyzes how the regulation of this equity factor, considering what has been accounted to be established as the law, might influence the mitigation in cases where the law is indefinite. Because of this, the thesis also contains an analysis about why this is the case and how these questions might be answered. [1] The translation has been made in accordance with ‘Ds 1999:36’.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:su-170273 |
| Date | January 2019 |
| Creators | Hamnström, Beatrice |
| Publisher | Stockholms universitet, Juridiska institutionen |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | Swedish |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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