On Penalty Mitigation

The history of human civilization is a kind of evolutionary development process. Criminal law, as a social legal system, is progressing continuously from barbarism to civilization with the development of human society. During several thousand years' penalty history, the most obvious tendency is light punishment. China's traditional ideology of heavy punishment runs in the opposite direction. Therefore, we should have a correct concept of the penalty and adopt moderate penalty to comply with the requirements of the times and development of our country. In this thesis, the writer gives a detailed study and demonstration of the penalty.This thesis is divided into five sections to conduct a study on this topic. The first part focused on the meaning of light penalty, indicating light penalty is one trend or representing some conception and doses not mean that each criminal is given the minimum punishment. The second part clarifies the trend of the penalty in the world by making a research of actuality of the punishment in the countries of common law system and civil law system. The third part analyses inevitability of this trend on a theoretical and practical basis. In one hand, from the theoretical viewpoint, this section indicates the legitimacy of light punishment by analyzing the main purpose and the value orientation of the penalty. The purpose of penalty is not punishment, but educating and altering criminals. Meanwhile, the modern concept of punishment demands that punishment not only defend the community, combat and punish criminals; but also focused more on security of citizens and protection of human rights, including the human rights of perpetrators. In another hand , from a practical point of view, China's current goal is building a socialist harmonious society. And social fairness and justice is a basic condition for achieving social harmony. So the goal of building a harmonious society requires us to improve our legal system. We also should strike on principles of the equality of citizens before the law, protection of human rights, guarantee of the rights and freedoms of citizens and so on. So, we should have more gentle penalty so as to give citizens more freedom and help to achieve the goal in a stable and orderly way. From the opposite view, the felony criminal policy which our government is adopting in recent years does not control and reduce the quantity of crime. Therefore, China should implement more light and gentle penalty. The Fourth part mainly introduces the actuality of our country's penalty and analyzes some kind of penalty and current criminal policies and guidelines. In the Fifth part, the writer references foreign penalty system and puts forward concrete methods in light of China's specific environment, to realize the goal of light punishment.