The Clarity of a Court Decision in Criminal Proceedings: A Linguistic Attribute or a Necessary Property?

In research on the quality of a court decision, considerable attention is focused on the issues of its compliance with established requirements – legality, validity and fairness. The need to endow a court decision with other non-procedural properties is discussed much less frequently in science. The tendency to complicate the language of the Russian law, disregard for the rules of legal technique in business writing and high demand for automation of the procedure of drafting justice acts form the risk that court decisions will no longer be understood by participants of the process, including its professional part. The clarity of a court decision is not a mandatory requirement of the Criminal Procedure Code of the Russian Federation, however, it determines the actual possibility of its further assessment for compliance with regulatory criteria. The purpose of the study is to identify negative and positive linguistic techniques used in the texts of court decisions that affect their semantic accessibility. Based on the specialized literature, the article analyzes styles and language of legal writing; it empirically establishes positive and negative practices of drafting court decisions; the results are synthesized into interim and final conclusions. Results: the article shows language styles and techniques that are not typical for judicial acts, both decorating the judge's style and strengthening the argumentation of his arguments, and distorting the meaning of justice. A noticeable increase in the perception of the meaning of judicial decisions is shown when excluding unnecessary quotes from legal acts and visually structuring the text. It is proven that the abuse of clichéd formulations, copying fragments of other procedural documents and a template presentation of the position not only reduce the clarity of the decision, but also harm the interests of the parties and justice.