With confiscation, they reached “Riga” – Newspaper Kommersant No. 14 (7459) of 01/26/2023

Six months ago, the courts received the right to use the confiscation of citizens’ cars for gross repeated violations of traffic rules. There are no official law enforcement statistics, but Kommersant’s analysis of public data shows that mass practice has not yet become widespread: within the framework of the amendments that have entered into force, several dozen sentences have been handed down in the country, mainly for repeated drunk driving. In addition to cars, other types of vehicles are also turned to the state, including the Gazelle, a Soviet motorcycle with a sidecar, an electric scooter, and even a home-made all-terrain vehicle.

The so-called law on confiscation of cars (amendments to the Criminal Code proposed by United Russia), we recall, came into force on July 25, 2022. According to the amendments, a car can be turned into state revenue if the driver was caught drunk driving for the second time during the year (Article 264.1 of the Criminal Code), or he drove into the oncoming lane three times during the same period, exceeded the speed limit by 60 km/h, or drove a vehicle, being deprived of his rights for gross violations of traffic rules committed earlier (Article 264.2 and Article 264.3 of the Criminal Code).

There are no official data on law enforcement practice yet: the Judicial Department under the Supreme Court will publish annual statistics only in the spring. But in the file cabinets of courts, reports of the regional Ministry of Internal Affairs, the traffic police and prosecutors, as well as in the State Autonomous Inspectorate “Pravosudie”, there were reports of confiscations of cars. Kommersant, in the course of analyzing these data, found more than 50 sentences or messages about them.

The police began to apply the new tool almost immediately after the amendments came into force. So, already at the end of July, the police of the city of Uyar (Krasnoyarsk Territory) after the chase stopped a VAZ-2114 without license plates: the driver was drunk, in May he was already punished for drunk driving. Thus, he committed a crime under Art. 264.1 of the Criminal Code, the court sentenced him to confiscation of the car and compulsory work as punishment. Similar sentences were handed down in Sakhalin, Volgograd, Kursk, Tyumen, Chelyabinsk, Astrakhan, Saratov, Omsk, Kaliningrad regions, Mordovia, Yakutia, Karachay-Cherkessia, Kamchatka, Perm and Altai territories, Crimea, Primorye, YNAO, Buryatia, Udmurtia, Moscow. In October, a woman was detained in Yoshkar-Ola for repeated drunk driving, who, after committing a crime, sold her car for 150,000 rubles. The court recovered this money in favor of the state instead of confiscating the car in accordance with Art. 104.2 of the Criminal Code.

In the Voronezh region, one of the courts turned a Gazelle into state ownership; in Buryatia, a motorcycle; in Mordovia, a scooter; in the Kostroma region, an Izh Jupiter motorcycle with a sidecar; areas — electric scooter Kugoo. Drivers are sometimes judged immediately on a number of articles, not only on 264.1. One of the courts of the Amur region, for example, sentenced a drunk driver for violating traffic rules and for illegal possession of drugs: he transported marijuana in a makeshift all-terrain vehicle while intoxicated.

We also note the decision of the Salavat Interdistrict Court of Dagestan in relation to the driver, who was previously punished four times for drunk driving and in October 2022 was drunk driving for the fifth time. In addition to confiscation, the driver was sentenced to 10 months in prison.

Appeals in such cases have so far been rare. In December, the Judicial Collegium for Criminal Cases of the Khanty-Mansiysk Autonomous Okrug, considering a complaint against the sentence of one of the drivers, sent the case for a new trial. The lawyer complained: the defendant is a pensioner in poor health who needs a means of transportation, including to perform the compulsory work assigned to him.

Almost all decisions on confiscation of vehicles (or reports about them) for repeated violations discovered by Kommersant concern cases of drunk driving. Only in the Orenburg region in September was a Kawasaki motorcycle confiscated from a biker, who had previously been punished twice during the year for driving into an oncoming lane, in August he committed the same violation for the third time (thus, he committed a crime under part 1 of article 264.2 of the Criminal Code).

For repeated speeding by 60 km / h, there will most likely be no decisions at all, says Serhiy Radko, a lawyer for the Freedom of Choice movement. This is due to the fact that in July 2022, Interior Minister Vladimir Kolokoltsev banned the traffic police from using manual speed detectors, and according to data from automatic cameras, violators are only sent a fine by mail. Confiscation can stop many violators, lawyer Lev Voropaev believes. “People around and acquaintances are afraid to give their car to such a person, fearing that in which case they will take it away,” he explains. “Confiscation of someone else’s car that does not belong to the criminal is prohibited, but the population does not know the rules, and psychology works well.”

The further fate of the confiscated vehicle is described in government decree No. 1238 “On the disposal of property turned into the property of the state,” Rosimushchestvo explained to Kommersant. During the examination, the market value is established, after which the confiscation is sold through an electronic auction. If there is no demand, the price of the vehicle put up for auction is gradually reduced by 30, 60 and 90%. “The proceeds from the sale of confiscated property are subject to transfer to the budget of the Russian Federation,” the Federal Property Management Agency noted.

Ivan Buranov