The conclusions of the Constitutional Court are correct; however, the legislative warranties are required to ascertain that the selection of the means of restraint were not utilized by the office of preliminary investigations wrongly, namely, as a punishment an unacceptable method of influencing the defendants.

In relation to particularly grave crimes the existing law provides that the defendant’s custody cannot exceed 18 months, even during the times when the case is returned to a prosecutor for completion to eliminate any obstacles for presenting it to court. Upon approval of the extension of defendant’s custody, investigative office could under a pretext of eliminating the obstacles and allowing the defendant to familiarize him/herself with the case materials use time for investigative actions to remedy the shortcomings of the earlier investigation. In addition, since the law does not limit the ability of the court to transfer the case to the prosecution to eliminate any obstacles to hearing, the extension of the custody time-frame tends to become indefinite, being limited, perhaps, only by statute of limitation for indictment. It does not seem to be productive to create practically a new norm by way of such constitutional interpretation and thus contradicting our own positions, formulated earlier and adopted by the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation, by using a very vague term of “reasonable” instead of a definitive time limitation of the custody.

As a result of the indeterminate legal language, the provisions of Article 109 of the Criminal Procedure Code could be interpreted in reality very freely, as enabling courts to repeatedly extend absolute deadlines of custody during investigation, after returning the case to the prosecutor’s office without giving consideration to the time period of the preliminary investigation (including cases when the absolute deadline for custody, i.e. 6, 12, 18 months since the day of criminal indictment was reached prior to court submission). Notably, the indeterminate nature of the legal language allows the courts to use the provisions of the Article 109 of the Criminal Procedure Code in relation with Article 237 of said Code in such manner as to imply that counting of the time-frame for preliminary investigation, as well as a time-frame for custody, including absolute deadlines (6, 12, 18 months), after returning the case materials to the prosecutor’s office, starts anew every time. It is therefore extremely significant to stress that the defendant “pays” in such instances not for his/her negative behavior, but exclusively for the “omissions of the preliminary investigation” - i.e. for the mistakes of his/her procedural adversary - the prosecutor’s side.