The Judicial Practice And System Construction Of Victim-Offender Reconciliation In China

In recent years, the practice and theory of the Victim-offender reconciliation have gradually been in-depth. While the function and value of the Victim-coffender reconciliation has been widely recognized, the relevant systems and procedures have not been really established, which is not conducive to the rational use of the Victim-offender reconciliation and couldn't respond to the queries. Therefore, a important problem demanding prompt solution is that how to respond to the resistance and problems encountered in the Victim-offender reconciliation practices and build an unified, scientific and rational system of the Victim-offender reconciliation, which will play its functions of repairing social relations and promoting harmony rightly and well. This paper selects the D-city with basis of practice and typical meaning of the system as a sample, takes the investigation, prosecution and trial of the judicial departments as the research object, tries refining the universal and relevant factors of this system in China through D-City's practice, analyses the problems and shortcomings, and then conceives the Chinese model of the Victim-offender reconciliation system.Besides the introduction and conclusion, the text is divided into four parts.The first part is an overview of the Victim-offender reconciliation. This system comes from the Canadian restorative justice, which is the reflection and correction to the modern criminal justice with the core of retribution.The Victim-offender reconciliation system has more theoretical practice than theory, there is obviouse definition divergence. Basing on the study and the integration of various definitions, the Victim-offender reconciliation is a system that the criminal who pleads guilty in good faith, shows repentance, and gets the killed side's understanding through the square to the victim and compensation for losses, is given lighter punishment by the judicial authority. Practice has proved that the Victim-offender reconciliation have the positive effects of the promotion of democracy, social harmony and justice, of improving judicial efficiency, social reintegration of offenders, and of enhancing of social control, all of which have been approved in the international community and China's practice.The second part is the empirical study of the Victim-offender reconciliation of D-City. Through participant observation, statistics, case studies, questionnaires, interviews and so on, I found that D-City the Victim-offender reconciliation is used in investigation, prosecution, especially the trial stage. The models of reconciliation are different in those stages of the proceeding, but those reconciliations all follow the "public right start" principle, the main scope is minor crimes. Overall, D-City's Victim-offender reconciliation will help protecting the victims' right, prompting social reintegration of offender as soon as possible, saving judicial resources and reducing litigation cost. But there are also conditions that victims prefer compensation for emotional exchange, which is prone to lead to the "criminal money" and other criticism.The third part is based on the D-City, discusses the theoretic, institutional and operational problems and difficulties of the Victim-offender reconciliation in our country. The challenge of theoretical dimensions are: the impact of the principle of fairness, concern for judicial efficiency and conflict of judicial role in the reconciliation. System-level barriers involve three main areas: imperfect legislation; constraints of arresting, meetings, public prosecution to personal action and so on; the lack of parties social surveys mechanism, community correction system, the victim assistance system and other supporting mechanisms.The problems of operational level are mainly in: single way of reconciliation, based on economic damages; the difficult regrets deal after the reconciliation; not easy to determine whether the defendant have good faith; the loss of reconciliation leaded by victims of excessive demands.Part IV is under the above analysis, the idea of building the Victim-offender reconciliation is proposed. The structure of Victim-offender reconciliation can take up the mode of experimental unit first following the legislation, which means that allows the pilot and sums over the basis of pilot experience to promote legislation, by modifying the《Criminal Law》,《Criminal Procedure》to clearly set up the Victim-offender reconciliation, and enact《Criminal Protection of Minors Law》,《Community Corrections Act》and other supporting system as necessary. Specifically, tthe Victim-offender reconciliation should follow the basic principles of the legal, voluntary, fair, protecting the victims and public interest; under the speciality of investigation, prosecution and trial stages to set up specific rules, which leading to a "detection - Prosecution - Trial" effective convergence of the Victim-offender reconciliation; the scope of reconciliation should be gradually expanded from a misdemeanor cases to the full cases; supporting systems should be established to ensure the correct operation of the Victim-offender reconciliation, such as building repentance evaluation, improving the community correction system and so on.