COLLECTION OF EVIDENCE IN CRIMINAL PROCEEDINGS AS A COMPONENT OF THE EVIDENTIARY PROCESS

Abstract

The article is dedicated to elucidating the essence of evidence collection in criminal proceedings as a component of the evidentiary process. It is demonstrated that domestic scholars predominantly reveal the content of evidence collection through a set of operations that constitute this activity. It is emphasized that the instrumental actions and cognitive processes of the subject of proving, as a result of which evidentiary information transitions to their consciousness from the source (medium), should be defined as the examination of evidence and distinguished from its collection. In turn, the core component of evidence collection, according to the author, is the fix-ation of evidentiary information. This involves transforming such information into a certain form that allows it to be preserved for the future and transmitted for use by other partici-pants in the criminal process. Fundamentally, fixation of evidence can be carried out in two non-mutually exclusive ways: by seizing and preserving the source (medium) of the evi-dentiary information in its natural form, and by transferring specific characteristics of such an object onto a specially created model. It is emphasized that fixation of evidence is always preceded by its discovery – the acquisition by the subject of proving information about the source (medium) of the eviden-tiary information as a result of their targeted search or the proactive submission of such an object or information about it by other participants in the criminal proceedings. Based on the above, it is proposed to understand collection of evidence as a compo-nent of proving, a process that involves the discovery by an authorized subject of a specific source (medium) of potentially evidentiary information and fixation of the information ob-tained from it.