An Empirical Research On Our Country's Application Of Suspended Death Senteance

From a global perspective, the limitation and the reduction, until abolishing the death penalty has become a world tendency. Our country is impossible of independence outside the world and defending stubbornly the position of entrusting the death penalty. In 2007, the reexamining of death penalty was reclaimed by the Supreme People's Court, from which we can see the Chinese government's sober understanding to the future of death penalty that the death penalty is finally to be abolished. In fact, the domestic theory and practice are forwarding to the goal of abolishing death penalty in awareness or not. This conforms to the world tendency of abolishing death penalty. But it is not realistic to achieve the goal of abolishing death penalty in a short time. At present, under the situation that abolishing death penalty is not our country's current death penalty policy, the suspended death sentence system is playing an important role in the policy of "insisting less killing, killing cautiously, preventing wrong killing". But we cannot merely satisfy the present effect of suspended death sentence system which is certain away from our goal of fully using the suspended death sentence. Our goal is not only using the suspended death sentence system to reduce the quantity of being executed criminals which is at a high level at present, but also hoping to use the unique value of the suspended death sentence system of reducing the immediately executed death penalty to achieve the final goal of abolishing death penalty. Certainly, analyzed from the legal norm, the present suspended death sentence system still has lots of insufficiency. For example, the application condition of suspended death sentence is too simple and abstract, which is unable to define accurately "extremely serious crime", "not to carry out immediately". Therefore, it doesn't do a concrete and classified instruction to the application of suspended death sentence, which causes many malpractices in the practice of suspended death sentence, and the function of suspended death sentence has not been played fully.The application of suspended death sentence system already has the history of several dozens years, but until now, to the understanding of application condition of suspended death sentence, we still stay in a surfaced and subjective level, lacking of empirical survey and research to the suspended death sentence. For more concrete knowing and understanding to the application of suspended death sentence and simultaneously making some thinking and suggestions of the application of suspended death sentence, the author attempts to make an empirical analysis of the application of suspended death sentence. The author is very fortunate that the idea has obtained the support of some judges from the criminal court of some Higher People's Court. Under the help of those judges, I have collected massive precious first-hand materials. The analytical object is 58 suspended-death-sentence written judgments (from 2007 to 2009 year-period)) selected randomly from that Higher People's Court. The author uses the means of table statistics, comparison, and data analysis to do a rough empirical analysis research to the current application of suspended death sentence. It draws the conclusion of some problems existed in the current application of suspended death sentence. For example, the criminal type relatively centralized in the practice of suspended death sentence; the substantive condition of application of suspended death sentence being complex and not explicit; what's more, there being some wrong understandings of suspended death sentence in the practice.