Empirical Research On Voluntary Surrender

Voluntary surrender is a very important circumstance for liberal punishment in our criminal discretion system, it's the concrete and legal application of the basic criminal policy of combining punishment with leniency, and it's definitely vital in legal practices in order to isolate and disintegrate criminals, punish the few and reform the many, educate and rebuild the spirits of the criminals, prevent crimes, as well to enhance the efficiency of justice, reduce the cost of legal activities at the same time, find the crimes in time and punish the criminals, maintain justice of the society. In the legal practice of the public security organ, the procuratorates and the courts, the cognizance of voluntary surrender is the direct embodiment of carrying out the legal duty of collecting comprehensive evidence which can prove the defendants' innocence or less punishment.This dissertation is divided into two sections, each section includs three chapters, nearly200thousands words in all.The first section of the dissertation is about the development of voluntary surrender in our history. In this section, the succession and development of voluntary surrender will be fully discussed. In the first chapter, the author will investigate the legislative transformation of the legal system of voluntary surrender systematically based on our long history of legal culture, which procedure in our saying can be called "use the history as a mirror to reflect nowadays and the future"; by doing the investigation, the author expects to find some development clues of the legislative ideas and principles of the voluntary surrender system which may be buried in the history, and think about the cultural source of voluntary surrender system. In the second chapter, the author will carry out a research on the development of the voluntary surrender system after the funding of P.R.C in order to get clear clues of voluntary surrender system's transition. In the last chapter of the first section, the author will focus on the criminal policy of "voluntary surrender on a fixed period of time" which have been enforced several times after the funding of P.R.C, its country-level and local practice, and reconsider its advantages and disadvantages as well.The second section is about the enforcement of voluntary surrender in legal practice. In this section, the author will carry out the research in three chapters, focusing on the actual course in the different phrases of the public security organ, the procuratorates and the courts. In chapter one, the author will talk about the standard of choosing samples of the reseach due to the importance of samples to a empirical reseach. In chapter two, the author explores the legal practice of voluntary surrender in the public security organ, the procuratorates and the courts, reconsider the potential problems exists in this phrase by viewing the enforcement of "the action of hunting the escaped" and the criminal policy of "voluntary surrender on a fixed period of time" in the year of2011. The author will research on the cognizance of voluntary surrender in the phrase of the procuratorates, the status, cognizance, the transformation of understandings of the procurators to voluntary surrender will be the main points of this chapter, the author will give some explainatations on the base of data and real criminal cases. At the same time, the author will find out how the escaped defendants think of voluntary surrender and why they decided to surrender voluntarily by interviewing them. The author will observe the cognizance of voluntary surrender and its function to a sentence, especially to a death-penalty sentence. Meanwhile, the legal representative will step into the research, their understanding of voluntary surrender and requests in the cases will also be heard.As the character of this dissertation, the value and cultural analysis of voluntary surrender is an important part. In this part, the author review the value content and cultural bases of voluntary surrender. The contents above can be found in third chapter.Law is not born with us mankind, it will not be everlasting as well; it itself is a phenomena of social culture. Law, including criminal law, is a product when our society evolves to a certain period of times, and it will always adapt to the society and culture. Law is not a gift from God, but an intellectual design and cultural creature of human civilization. Then, here comes the question. Why voluntary surrender is much more sophisticated in China's legal system compared with the west which pays more attention to utilitarianism? Is there any relation between the sophistication of voluntary surrender and our traditional culture?In the last two decades of last century, knowledges,methods and views of jurisprudence of economic analysis is diffusely applied to the research of law department and it became the remarkable development of jurisprudence.lt highly focuses on the value of efficiency of law and take the economic methods to analyze problems in law department. What if we discuss the values rooted in law using the tools of economic analysis? What the result could be? That's the second issue to be answered in the last session in the first chapter of the second section. Why should we discuss value rooted in law? Because law can be well understood only by confirming the value in it. Law, a creature of mankind, the only reason of being created is to satisfy our needs. Law gets its own value by fulfilling out goals designed in it. Then, voluntary surrender, which was kept being perfected since originated more than2000years ago and is still playing an important role in legal practice, what would be the value in it? The two questions above will be answered in the third chapter.