On Modern Rules For Oral Confession

The oral confession is a sort of direct but disputable evidence form, and the rules for the oral confession have an important position in the rules for evidences. The attitude towards oral confessions, to a certain extent, reflects a country's level of criminal government by law. The rules for the oral confession not only regard its arbitrary nature as the prerequisite for an oral confession to have its evidence capacity, but also formulate the direct stipulations for an oral confession to have its probative force. Along with the development of the modern rules for the oral confession, the right to silence and traditional arbitrary statute tend to integrate with each other, and both of them supplement each other to further secure the statement freedom. This also causes the arbitrary judgment to tend from the substantive judgment to formal judgment, and the oral-confession exclusive rules have developed from discretionary exclusion to automatic exclusion. In the contemporary age, though some of the countries impose certain restricts on the practice of the right to silence, yet the maintenance and intensifying of the security of the right to silence are still a basic trend in the sphere of contemporary world criminal justice administration. There is a profound theoretical foundation, statutory proper grounds and extremely great actionable value existing behind the modern rules for the oral confession. The rules for the oral confession have different characteristics in different historical periods, and different countries have differences in their specific system designs because of their varied action traditions, but there is a common principle and basic rules existing in the modern rules for the oral confession. In establishing its modern rules for the oral confession, our country may draw lessons from overseas countries to gradually perfect them on the basis of the actual conditions of our country.