Study On The Life Imprisonment System And Construct A New Structure For It In China

The life imprisonment is one kind of criminal penalty depriving of personal lifelong liberty, which was inferior to the death penalty in the penalty structures for severity. It has being suitable in punishing to serious guilty for a long time, and being frequently used as an alternative sentence of the death penalty. As the situation of death penalty declining, the stern life imprisonment could not play an important role to replace the death penalty in China due to the restrictions and influences of historic and reality conditions. Therefore, no matter punishing serious crimes or replacing of the death penalty, it is necessary to reforming or building new system structure for life imprisonment system in China, to fit the current criminal policy with comfortable and sternly penalty coexisting. In this paper, we analyze deeply the disadvantages of the current life imprisonment system in judicial practice based on inspecting its history change and present situation. Referencing the foreign country experiences and combining Chinese national condition, a new idea is put forward about establishing the relative and absolute system for life imprisonment in this paper. As be following:Firstly, because of the existence reducing penalty system, destroy the independence and severity of life imprisonment, made it almost equal to fixed-term imprisonment in the judicial practice. Therefore, should cancel reducing a penalty, and establish the new relative life imprisonment system with a sentence allotted time, and extend the time of relative life imprisonment.Secondly, the death penalty can be replaced by the absolute life imprisonment with deprivation of liberty for life and no parole. That is agreement with the criminal policy requirements at present.Finally, the new system should be applied carefully in judicial practice, the form of execution for life imprisonment need to adjusting in practice sentences.