Issuance of deeds of indicment

Filing a deed of indictment with the court by a prosecutor (or another entitled and empowered authority) is one out of 5 possible decisions to finalise the preparatory proceedings. That decision is vital since filing a deed of indictment launches the court proceedings and in its essence it is the specific petition to convict an offender for a specific criminal offence. From the point of view of the criminal proceedings, it is important that the moment a deed of indictment is filed changes the status of a suspect into the accused.

Formal requirements that a deed of indictment must satisfy will serve as the subject matter of a separate elaboration, however, it bears noting that its indispensable content inter alia requires a precise profile of the accused person and the offence the accused person is charged with within the context of the investigated course of committing an offence and related legal qualification of an offence. The aforementioned content of a deed of indictment provides for it to satisfy 2 essential functions of the criminal proceedings: the concluding function and the programming function.

The concluding function of a deed of indictment must be understood to contain a detailed description of an offence the accused is charged with and a summary of all the findings hitherto compiled by investigation authorities, including the index of the body of evidence gathered by those authorities. On the other hand, the programming function must be understood in such a way that the content of a deed of indictment sets out the objective of the proceedings, it programmes the proceedings within the context of the examination conducted by the court whether the accused committed the offence the accused is charged with on the grounds of the facts presented by the prosecutor.

A deed of indictment is served upon both the accused and the defence counsel. It bears noting that the accused may exercise the right of the option to respond to a deed of indictment. Such a response may contain the position and standpoint of the accused and comments on the accusations of the prosecutor as well as petitions such as:  a petition for conditional discontinuance of proceedings, a petition for discontinuance of proceedings, and a petition for the case to be rejected and returned to the prosecutor to remedy essential deficiencies in   the preparatory proceedings. The aforementioned petitions may be put under consideration by the court at the court hearing before the main trial.

Filing a deed of indictment with the court is the legal action within the framework of the proceedings, which launches the trial, and is the representation of the prosecutor’s demand to convict an individual accused of a criminal offence  that an individual is charged with by means of a deed of indictment.