Developments related to Effect of drunkenness on criminal liability With emphasis onnew Islamic penal code 2013 Approaches and Challenges

In various periods of legislation, the Islamic Penal Legislator has established the primary principle of the criminal responsibility of the intoxicated perpetrators based on the well-known jurisprudential viewpoint and considered some exceptions to it. Adoption of such an approach, besides its alignment with the principles of fairness and public order, has led this law to enjoy solid jurisprudential and legal principles. Meanwhile, some significant changes have been made in the criteria of applying this approach in the Islamic Penal Code (2013); among them are making distinction between the voluntary and non-voluntary drunkenness, determining source of drunkenness (addiction toalcohol, drugs, psychotropic drugs, etc.), making changes in the conditions of applying some certain criteria for the enforcement of criminal responsibility like restriction of the previous intention of absolute crime to the previous intention for the occurrence of the crime in question, predicting the new criterion of the knowledge of the crime occurrence, distinction between the proofs of criteria for the criminal liability of crimes committed in drunken state, and legal clarification of the monetary compensation for the criminal responsibility in drunkenness. Nevertheless, this law suffers from some ambiguities and legal deficiencies, including the ambiguity in the type of murder, like a situation where a drunk wants to kill a certain person and someone else is killed by mistake, ambiguity in “subjectivity” or “objectivity of the criterion of the knowledge to crime, ambiguity in the type and amount of punishments prescribed in Article 307, and contradiction or lack of contradiction between Articles 153 and 307 and Articles 120 and 128 of this Act.