Modernization of Evidence in Criminal Proceedings in the Context of Digital Transformation

Criminal justice is becoming more and more digital. More and more discussions are taking place around information in electronic form, giving it procedural significance. The author theoretically analyzed the need for a fundamental change in approaches to working with electronic information, giving it an independent legal status in evidentiary law, as well as ways to ensure the reliability of electronic information with evidentiary value. Materials and Methods: the article uses materials from judicial practice, examines the legal positions of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation and the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation, the opinions of the authors of domestic criminal procedure law, and analyzes foreign experience in using electronic evidentiary information. The methodological basis consists of the dialectical method, the method of modeling, abstraction, comparative legal and formal legal methods, induction and deduction. Results: possible ways and approaches of the legislator and law enforcement officer to the choice of the legal nature and status of electronic information are identified; the conclusion is made that it is necessary to recognize information in electronic form as one of the types of evidence, requiring at the same time increased guarantees of their reliability through the use of modern methods of storage and provision of limited access. Discussion and Conclusions: the author's conclusions provide the basis for the inclusion of information in electronic form in the traditional evidentiary theory as one of the forms, along with evidence in the form of documents or physical evidence, using new, highly technologically advanced procedural methods of their fixation and storage. The author's view of information in electronic form seems appropriate both from the point of view of the technical potential of Russian society and from the point of view of the psychological perception by society of the level of information security in the criminal law sphere and the inadmissibility of hasty changes in theoretically supported and accepted approaches to law enforcement practice.