The subject of this publication is an attempt to establish the relationship that exists between penal populism and criminal law instruments leading to the decriminalisation or exclusion from punishment of hitherto punishable behavior. The phenomenon of penal populism is, in fact, traditionally associated with an increasing repressiveness of criminal law. As a consequence, statutory solutions revoking the punishability of certain criminal acts should be treated as opposing penal populism. The analysis was carried out on the example of the Penal Code regulations ensuring non-criminalization in certain cases of exceeding the limits of necessary self-defense. This leads to the conviction that also the depenalization procedure may correspond to the characteristics ascribed to penal populism. Consequently, it seems unjustified to limit this concept only to measures leading to an increase in the repressiveness of criminal law.