The Search Of The Sentencing Standardization

In China, the sentencing in the criminal law refers to "discretionary punishment", which means, upon the conviction, according to the crimes the perpetrators committed, the severity of the crimes and the criminal responsibility, the criminal trial activities of deciding whether to sentence, or if sentence, what kind of penalty should be, to what penalty degree, and if the sentence is implemented immediately by the People's Court. Chinese judicial practice has long been subject to the traditional thoughts of "heavy conviction, light sentence" and "heavy penalty doctrine". Sentencing issue has not received due attention until recent years. Now part of the courts began to pay attention to the problem. The investigation related found that the phenomena of non-standard sentence are prominent in China:crime and punishment is not fit; the criminal species applied are imbalanced; the way to affirm the sentencing details is non-standard; and sentencing methods are based on unscientific experiences. The main underlying reasons are:the unreasonable allocation of legal punishment to penalty, the inadequacy of theoretical sentencing study, the lack of effective summary and regulation of judicial experience, the low proficiency in law theories of the judge, too much discretion to the judges, and the restriction from the trial system.At present, the standardization of sentencing reform is inevitable. This paper is to reflect and reconstruct this point from the substantive and procedural aspects. By knowing the principles, methods, and procedures of sentencing, especially some problems, and introducing some good practices and experiences in Europe and America, this paper advocates establishing our own independent sentencing guidelines in China, so as to uniform balanced sentence, put an end to unfair sentencing phenomena; advocates establishing an independent sentencing procedures, and introducing adversarial penalty method, sentence proposal system, and pre-sentence investigation in China, in order to reverse the current opaque sentencing situation through the standard method of sentencing, which is more effective to protect the legitimate rights and interests of the accused.