Voluntary abandonment in jointly committed offences

The totality of the stages that are performed for the crimes defined by the law to be committed is called "criminal path – iter criminis". This path consists of the phases of the preparatory acts and the execution acts. In order to determining whether an act qualifies as an executive act, the criterion of "direct execution" has been introduced in the Turkish Penal Code (TPC) No: 5237. Accordingly, acts that are in a certain relevance and connection with an intended crime would be considered as an executive acts. In the case of the incompletion of a crime; these acts are classified as criminal attempts if the reasons for the incompletion are not originated from the offender, and classified as voluntary abandonment if the reasons for the incompletion are originated from the offender. The legislator provides a "golden bridge"- as an opportunity to turn around for an offender who took the "criminal path"; it offers impunity as a privilege for the offender who voluntarily abandons the performance of the acts of committing an offence, or who prevents the completion of an offence or its consequence. Described situation is defined as "voluntary abandonment" by the Article 36 of the TPC. Although the crimes defined by the TPC are regulated as if they could be performed by a single offender as a rule, these crimes could be also performed by multiple offenders. This situation is termed as "Jointly Committed Offenses" and discriminated into two categories as principal involvement and complicity. The legislator regulated the scenario where not all the accomplices voluntarily abandoned the performed crime in particular. Voluntary Abandonment is the personal reason that remove the punishment; one of the accomplices benefitting from the voluntary abandonment does not indicate the crime has ceased to exist. These facts make it necessary to take both the institutions of Voluntary Abandonment and Jointly Committed Offenses into consideration while determining the responsibility of the rest of the accomplices. In this Master's Thesis the conditions of implementation of the Voluntary Abandonment in jointly committed offenses, the reason why this institution is particularly regulated and the necessary actions that accomplices should have taken are examined within the context of the TPC. In addition, how these provisions are reflected in practice is discussed through the examination of relevant judicial decisions. The concept of "voluntariness", which constitutes one of the main focuses of this study, has been shaped by judicial decisions; yet applying a comparative study would exceed the limits of this thesis. Therefore the scope of this Master's Thesis is limited by TPC No. 765 and TPC No. 5237, as well as the judicial decisions based on these Codes. The aim of this study is to present the necessary acts that are to be performed in order to benefit from the institution of Voluntary Abandonment as well as its reflections in the legislation.