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- Conviction appearing on the criminal record
Conviction appearing on the criminal record
Definition
The statistical approach has to use conventions to classify convictions when they concern multiple offences and/or sentences. That is why the concepts of principal offence and principal penalty were created, relatively autonomous concepts compared with their legal equivalents.
The principal offence is the first listed if all qualifications correspond to the same category (felony, misdemeanour or infringement); it is the first listed in the most serious category if the qualifications correspond to different categories (felony and misdemeanour for example).
The principal penalty is the most serious penalty pronounced in the most serious category. With the exception of discharges of penalties, all criminal penalties come before medium-level penalties regardless of their nature, which themselves come before police penalties.
