On Confession

It goes without exaggeration that no other types of evidence like confession made by criminal suspects and defendants, apart from its probative function for a case, may deeply reflect the conflicts between the safeguarding of individual rights and protection of the State interests in the procedural system, as well as the zigzagging path covered by mankind in the course of procedural democratization.Viewing the history of criminal procedure development and judicial practices existing in the countries all over the world, not a nation or a system ignores the direct probative hole confession is playing in the criminal cases. However, too much reliance and trust on confession may legalize the practice of acquiring evidence illegally, at the cost of individual procedural rights and justice of procedure. In addition, confession with the characteristics of complexity mingled with truth and falsity and uncertainty caused by changes of time and places finds it difficult to fully ascertain the facts of matter in a case. The confession shall be treated in a practical and two-folded manner, in which the value of confession should not be enlarged to an extreme extent, falling into the category of confession priority, just because of its probative function for a case and verification for other evidence, at the same time, the value of confession should not be denied just for human rights are easily violated in the acquisition of confession. It has been a common tendency of the criminal procedure in the countries of the world to stress but not be addicted to confession and to adopt some measures to restrict investigation based on the realization of the value of confession.The paper consists of three parts.Part One mainly deals with the legal status of confession. Confession is playing areally great role in the ascertainment of facts in the criminal proceedings as well as inthe system of criminal evidence. The history and changes of confession is researched inthe part with a view to the analysis of the legal statue of confession. With theestablishment of rights to silence, confession is restricted to some extent in the criminalproceedings in terms of its function. However, the system of the encouragement ofconfession is gradually improved, with the result that the disadvantages caused by thelack of confession in fighting crime is compensated, which puts confession in a greatposition which is not ignorable in the criminal proceedings and in the dealing ofsubstantive matters. By comparison with the tendency with regard to the developmentof confession, it is easily found that confession is heavily relied upon and criminalsuspects assume the obligation to tell the truth in the Criminal Procedural Law of China,which has a sad effect on China's incorporation into international criminal judicialdemocratization.Part Two is concerned with evidentiary admissibility. The part puts forward the idea that the standard of relevancy and the standard of voluntariness should be put at the same level in examining the evidentiary admissibility, with the former focused on the content of confession and the latter concerned with legitimacy of evidence collection. It is of great importance to exclude confession for lack of evidentiary admissibility in favor of the safeguarding of human rights, control of illegal investigation and maintenance of judicial justice, which is clarified in the part. It follows that the scope of illegal confession is defined, which involves breach of right informing, violation of the right to counsel, police interrogation by physical and spiritual coercion, fruits of poisonous tree and the exclusion of confession obtained illegally in violation of law and human rights protection .Moreover, the chances ways and burden of proof in determining the evidentiary admissibility of confession has been researched on basis of the practices in two legal systems and some suggestions are presented on the improvement of relating regulations with regard to evidence in China. Part Three empathetically deals with the issue of probative value. Althou...