On The Statement

Accused statement system is an important component of evidence system research, which involves in dual valuation orientation of control of crime and guarantee of human right, reflect the current status of a country’s democracy and legal system, indicate modern country’s situation of harmonious society and humanistic care, and relate to the balance for benefit conflict between state power and civil right as well as fulfillment of criminal procedure purpose. In China, accused statement system is not perfect as of now and extortion confession by torture and unjust judgment often occurred in legal practice. In addition, some issues as valuing confession and withdraw confession always puzzled judicial authority.Accused statement shall be distinguished with confession, admission and guilty plea in the concept. Accused statement is a specific concept in China’s criminal procedure, for China’s current criminal procedure, which not only refers to criminal suspect and defendant’s statement, but also include argument of the innocent and minor offence for oneself. Confession is a litigation system for a long history in western country, which doesn’t exist in China’s criminal procedure and western country’s criminal procedure laws don’t expressly stipulate such kind of evidence as accused statement. Confession equals to criminal suspect and defendant’s statement in China’s accused statement system, but argument shall not belong to the scope of confession, Britain, America and Japan distinguish confession from admission in criminal procedure. Defendant’s official recognition and guilty plea share the same effect in UK&US evidence system and guilty plea is a unique important criminal procedure system in UK&US evidence system, whose significance reflect on procedure rather than evidence.Accused statement owns an attribution of specification, substantivity, complexity and repeatability, which plays an important role and function in criminal evidence system. As a direct evidence, accused statement can assist justice officials in finding, collecting, examination, checking and deciding other evidence to facilitate investigation personnel try to avoid blind detection, and gradually narrow scope to save manpower and material resource in investigation.Accused statement system is a general term of principle, rule and specific system of collection of accused statement, examination and decision of accused statement, effect of illegal obtained accused statement and fundamental right of the accused statement person, stipulated by law. Accused statement system includes accused statement identification system, accused statement collection system and accused statement of examination and adoption system.From the perspective of the accused statement’s history development, ancient China’s accused statement system is just the history of torture, and shall be contributed to ancient China’s backward and low level investigation skill, combined with difficulty of evidence collection, which lead to the justice official heavily depend on accused statement. Under the governance of feudal autocracy monarchy in ancient China, it seriously lacks of the consciousness of human right and government by law, pursues of the principle of presumption of guilt and deems the folks as the governed object, which make the accused statement be the priority one of various kinds of evidence. Similarly, in ancient western countries, evidence system also go through the evidence system process from God indication to legal stipulation and then free evaluation of evidence system of continental law system to the series of evidence regulation established by cases of Anglo-American law system. The accused statement confession system develops from the initial systemic extort accused statement by torture to be more and more rational and civilizational.Two important concepts of probative force and evidence ability of evidence system in continental law system while the correlation and adoption of evidence for Anglo-American law system. As China’s evidence jurisprudential circle’s research on the building of evidence system is closer to the evidence system of continental legal system, based upon the analysis comparison of the concept of two legal system for evidence law, this paper focus on the research on the evidence arbitration for accused statement of the probative force and evidence ability.As for the perspective of evidence ability of accused statement, regardless of Anglo-American law system or continental law system, both common stipulate the voluntary confession rule, which means only the voluntary confession possess the evidence ability. Based upon the voluntary confession rule, further form the exclusion of illegal accused statement rule, making the non-voluntary confession without legal procedure of collection of evidence exclude the court application scope. This paper try to explain the due procedure to collect accused statement, i.e. building a rational accused statement collection procedure under the fundamental principle of privilege of silence, right to inform, obtain lawyer’s assistance, prohibition of extort confessions by torture and illegal evidence exclusion.As for the probative force of accused statement, the most important system is reinforcing rules. Probative force of accused statement refers to, as a kind of evidence, whether the accused statement take a proof effect to the case fact and the degree of the effect. Reinforcing rules refers to, regarding to criminal suspect and defendant’s accused statement, still requires other evidence to reinforce to be the rule for make a judgment. Reinforcing rule has dual purpose, firstly avoid judicial official extremely rely on accused statement, leading to illegal obtain accused statement, secondly avoid false identification of defendant’s guilty upon fake confession. Reinforce rule to accused statement is comprised of reinforce scope, evidence ability of the reinforce evidence and reinforce degree. To research on the use of reinforce rule, we shall analysis from such three perspective.In the Criminal Proceduel Law of China, which is amended at2012, there are some progressive regulations about the accused statement system. For example, there adds the rule of "no person can be forced to give evidence which may incriminate himself", the interrogation should be made sound and video recordings, the defence lawyer should not be monitored when he or she meets the defendant, and there adds the exclusionary rule of illegally obtained evidence. However, many problems and defects still exist, and there still is a large gap between China’s rules and the criminal justice rules of the United Nations.