Criminalistic Analysis of Evidence in Court as a Factor in Ensuring the Validity of the Verdict: An Analysis of Judicial Practice

The subject of the study is the criminalistic analysis of evidence carried out by the court of first instance in criminal cases. In this work, criminalistic analysis is understood as the court's mental activity of verifying and examining evidentiary material, aimed at identifying criminalistically significant patterns of the formation of evidentiary information: the mechanism of trace formation, conditions of perception of information, tactical features of investigative actions, and signs of accidental or intentional distortion of information. Typical defects of such activity and their impact on the validity of the verdict are examined. The empirical basis consists of 27 judicial acts of 2023–2025, selected on the criterion of containing direct indications of deficiencies in the evaluation of evidence. Particular attention is paid to situations where defects in analysis were accompanied by a change or reversal of the sentence. The causes of such errors and the possibilities of overcoming them by means of criminalistic methodology are investigated. The methodological basis comprises formal legal, comparative legal, statistical, systemic-structural methods, and the case study method. Analyzed are 27 judicial acts of 2023–2025, rulings of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation, appellate and cassation decisions, and reviews of practice. The scientific novelty lies in substantiating the criminalistic analysis of evidence as an independent category, encompassing the study of criminalistically significant patterns of the formation of evidentiary information. A five-level model of analysis is proposed, in which specifically criminalistic content is linked to the tactical level, which allows identifying substantive signs of distortion of information that are not obvious for purely procedural analysis. Based on the analysis of 27 judicial acts, four types of defects in criminalistic analysis have been identified: ignoring contradictions, incomplete assessment of legally significant circumstances, ignoring the arguments of the defense, and lack of reasoning. The correlation of each type of defect with the levels of the proposed model and with the criminalistically significant element that remained unexamined is demonstrated. Additionally, two accompanying phenomena are identified: unjustifiably severe punishment and violations of the rules in jury proceedings. Conclusions: in the studied sample, the most common are ignoring contradictions (33.3%) and incomplete assessment of circumstances (25.9%). The obtained data characterize the structure of a specially selected set and do not allow judging the prevalence of such defects in judicial practice as a whole. The proposed measures are correlated with specific types of identified defects.