Przestępstwo czy wykroczenie? O dylematach polskiego ustawodawcy w toku prac nad kodeksem karnym z 1969 r. — wybrane zagadnienia
Crime or Misdemeanor? On the Dilemmas of the Polish Legislator during the Work on the Criminal Code of 1969 — Selected Issues

Summary/Abstract: The article examines the course of the debate on the draft criminal code of the Polish People’s Republic of 1969 in the context of the law on misdemeanors. Two issues have been analyzed. The first is the influence of the material element of the prohibited act (social danger) on the distinction between misdemeanors and crimes. The second is the problem of qualifying the act of driving a motor vehicle in land traffic under the influence of alcohol or other intoxicants. The analysis has shown that the distinction between crime and misdemeanor was associated not so much with theoretical concerns, but primarily with ideological and political ones. In the case of a negligible social danger of a prohibited act in the sense stipulated by the Criminal Code, the legislator provided the possibility of the offender being held liable before another authority, including for a misdemeanor. This mechanism was consistent with the ideological approach to the alleged disappearance — or the “withering away” — of crime in the people’s state as the socialist revolution progressed. On the other hand, the issue of driving a vehicle under the influence of alcohol or another intoxicant was treated as a misdemeanor exclusively due to the need to keep the statistics of convictions down, and not because of this act’s low harmfulness (danger).

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