On Constructing The System Of Restricting The Application Of Death Penalty

There are two diametrically opposite viewpoints in the debate of whether to abolish death penalty: that of advocating retaining capital punishment and that of advocating abolishing death penalty. The relationship between these two viewpoints is not that of exclusion, but that of integration. At present and even within quite a long period in the future, retaining death penalty has positive significance, and abolishing death penalty immediately is unpractical. In judicial practice, the application of death penalty is overabundance, so restricting the application of death penalty has been commonly understood by the legal sector. To reform the present system of death penalty, the accusations which are applicable to death penalty should be reduced in the source of substantive law, and this reduction should be accomplished at one stroke rather than by stages, for reduction by stages will cause the instability of the law, and it's unfeasible both in logic and practice. By means of the definition of serious violence offenses and the analysis of the causality between violent behaviors and a person's death, we should restrict the application of death penalty to violent offenses, in other word, death penalty should be imposed only on those accusations whose basic elements are violent behaviors,a person's death and the necessarily causality between violent behaviors and a person's death. So death penalty should be set only in nine accusations in the Criminal Law. Meanwhile, in the light of the policy of combining punishment with leniency, we should take measures to reform other criminal punishments correspondingly, that is, to abolish death sentences with a suspension of execution,to keep the criminal who is sentenced to life imprisonment in prison for his whole life,to increase the upper limits of fixed-term imprisonment and to make full use of property punishments. In judicial practice, there still exist a great deal of problems in handling the case of death penalty, so with the policy of restricting the application of death penalty and the principle of justice and efficiency, we should perfect the stipulations such as prescription,the procedure for review of death penalty and standards of rendering meritorious service in the Procedural Law which concern death penalty, with a view to guarantee the operation of substantial law and to implement judicial justice in the case of death penalty.