The Analysis On Abolition Of Death Penalty In Perspective Of Economics And Law

There have great concern on the abolition of the death penalty for a long time. The abolition and the retention of the death penalty also have made fierce arguments; they prospectively put forward their views from the point of the value theory and methodology. These arguments not only enriched the theory, but also have great impact on the practice of the death penalty; however, neither of the two factions has some unreasonable. The first one is the unreasonable on the theoretical basis, mainly on philosophy, ethics and penology principles; the second one is the unreasonable on the irrationality basis.To analysis the death penalty from the point of economic, transaction costs in detail, we can see that the death penalty has a greater advantage on curbing the incidence, but from the view of efficiency, this system is obviously inefficient. The reason why we take this system is on its powerful deterrent, which has great raised the expected cost of crime perpetrators, so that effectively inhibited the crime incidence.From the point of deterrent, when we take the death penalty for first time, its deterrent impact is greatest, as the increasing use of death penalty, its marginal deterrence becomes diminishing.The costs of the death penalty mainly include process cost, enforcement cost, incidental cost and so on, the total costs are very alarming; correspondingly the revenue mainly contains the punishment to offenders, the balance of the whole public. Due to the different points, there exist different conclusions on comparison between cost and revenue. In order to analysis, we must clarify the definition of"cost". The cost includes not only material cost, but also those that can not be accurately measured using currency. The cost of death penalty can not be estimated with money, while the cost of freedom punishment can be defined as a certain amount of money, so from this sense the cost of death penalty is much greater than that of other penalty.The current supply of death penalty contain death penalty review system, death penalty defense system, reprieve system, justice policies and so on, these systems are all made under some certain conditions in order to meet the needs of the society. The demand of death penalty is mainly based on the improvement of defense system. In China, the current supply and demand for death penalty is unbalanced; the main reason is the inadequate supply, mainly inflect on the effectiveness of judicial activities, the lack of basic legal aspects.To summary the practice of the death penalty over the years, we find that there are many defects on the current death penalty in China, for instance defects of the applicable standards, the lack of effective supervision, the abuse of death penalty due to the unbalance of supply and demand, the derailed with the international death penalty system and so on. Now most countries over the world have abolished the death penalty, while the countries which still retain this system tend to abolish death penalty in legislation and in practice as well.While the main stream of the world is to abolish the death penalty, based on the current situation of our country, it should be not to abolish death penalty immediately, in other words, the death penalty should be retained, instead we should strictly limit the use of this penalty until the its abolishment. With the deep analysis on the China's reform, we suggest that we repeal non-violent crime gradually, increase the application of the criminal settlement, to some extent permitted expand the scope of the criminal settlement, relax the conditions so as to accomplish the real social justice, meanwhile we should take some measure with reference to western countries.