Research On The Witness System In The Criminal Lawsuit

About two centuries ago,Jeremy Bentham,the British utilitarianistic philosopher said that the art of justice actually is the art of using the testimony. Although this viewpoint is extreme,it explicitly points out the importance of testimony usage in the criminal lawsuit. The testimony is the soul of the lawsuit,the process of the lawsuit is that of using the testimony. The investigation is the activity of collecting the testimony,the trial is the process of researching and judging the testimony,as well as,the adjudication is the conclusion made after investigating the testimony in accordance with it. Then,Encri Filly said that Collecting the testimony ,researching it,and judging it,responds the whole content showing in the criminal lawsuit.The basic nature of the testimony decides its sole position in the criminal lawsuit,however,the different types of testimony have the different regularities and the different characters,among them ,because the witness' testimony is relevant with the person' factor,so it will become the most complicated type of the testimony. With deepgoing of the national justice system reform,it will become a problem not easy to solve to guaranty the truthfulness of the testimony,and it is the crux of the justice system reform as well as. The complexity ,importance and durability stirs the author to concern this problem. After researching and knowing it further,I feel that,the solving of this problem needs rely on the effective regularization of the witness,that means the person's factor is the subject that provides the testimony ,as the cause of making it complicated. However,anyone who comprehends the law all know that the norm of the law is the cell of law,and the rights and duties are the central contents of the norm of the law. But what are the rights and duties of the witness' norm of the law?How to regularize them? At present,they cannot be researched thorough in the law theory field and the judicial field,although there are sporadic stipulations in the legislation,the rights and the duties are not always equity and unbalance,even though in the passed by No. 1201 meeting of the judicial committee of the Supreme People's Court in December 6,2001,and applied from April 1,2002. this problem still exists rather outstanding. So,the author chooses the rights and duties of the witness as the point of contact to probe into the witness system of the criminal lawsuit.This article composes of three chapters,the first chapter is about the connotation and the extension of the witness,as the basic question in the article,the author probes into the problem in the connotation and the extension of the witness defined in the witness" concept ,advocates that during researching the witness' system,combining with the witness in a broad sense and that in a narrow sense,is the demand to inquire the different questions;the second is about the qualification of the witness,its focal point is to definite the limitation about the witness' qualification in our country;the third chapter is about the rights and duties of the witness,obviously,it is the central content in the article,and in this chapter,comparing the research of the western witness system,the author introspects the stipulation of the witness' rights and duties in our country,then provides the countermeasures.