Abstract: The fundamental mission of the doctor’s professional activity is to preserve objectively, efficiently and without discrimination the life, the health and the physical and psychical integrity of the human being. Due to the specific and to the importance of the involved work, the doctor’s profession is a special one relying on a solid professional training which is supported and enhanced continuously. Apart from the rigorous professional training, the doctor’s profession also involves talent, passion and much devotion for the interest and the good health of the human being. There are satisfactions, achievements and joys in the doctor’s professional activity but there is also a high degree of responsibility. From a juridical point of view, the doctor’s responsibility for the performed medical act may take different forms and it may be a disciplinary responsibility, a civil responsibility and a criminal responsibility. The present material has as an analysis theme and it is limited to the most serious form of responsibility that may occur, namely the doctor’s criminal responsibility. Thus, we will analyse the ground of involving the criminal responsibility, the types of crimes that may be imputed to a doctor for the deeds fulfilled during the professional tasks and the consequences of the criminal responsibility. In order to know and understand better the analysed problems, the theoretical reasons presented here will be accompanied by a series of practical examples that were extracted from the national judicial practice. The selected practical cases have different crimes as a subject (homicide, negligence at work etc.) whereas the common element is the one of committing the crimes by the doctors while fulfilling their tasks and professional skills. For a better practical illustration of the approached topic, we have chosen cases where the competent judicial body decided to make criminally responsible the doctor for medical mal praxis cases; we have also chosen cases where it was definitely established that the constitutive elements of a crime were not fulfilled and thus there was no ground to consider that the doctor was criminally responsible.
Keywords: criminal responsibility; medical guilt; medical malpraxis; criminal case-law in the medical; indifference; negligence.