Studying On The Application Of Death Penalty In Tang Dynasty

The death penalty is the most serious penalty in the punishment system and has a long history, which deprives criminal lives. It is not only an important part of legal system, but also an exhibition of social culture, whose natute, functions and value-orientations closely relate to social cultures. Whether the application of death penalty is reasonable or not would directly impacts the social stability, so it is considered that it is not just only an application of punishment but a social issue. Thereby, studying on the application of death penalty in a special society is necessary.Tang Dynasty is an important feudal society developing period in China, whose economy, culture, and politics had reached at unprecedented height. Meanwhile, it is a glory period of ancient improvement of legal systems, which was up to a pretty high level.The paper would study on the application of penalty in Tang Dynasty to learn more things such as the mentality, convention, tendency and other things about it, then, to have a comprehensive understanding of the death penalty and the legal culture in Tang Dynasty, which would make us understand deeply into the inherent relationship between social life, law and the reality.The paper has three parts:The first part studys on ideas impacting the application of death penalty in Tang Dyansty. There are to some extent limitations for law conforming with all-embracing, ever-changing social activities, and the law can't realize by itself, thus, ideas play a great role in the application of law. Meanwhile, the application of law is an artificial course, closely relating to ideas of human being, is deeply affected by ideas of judges or other persons. So it is necessay to disccuss the ideas affecting the application of law. This part mainly discusses some relatively notable and fairly common ideas, including fair idea, the idea of balancing rule and etiquette, and the ?idea of prudent penalty. The given three ideas subconsciously influnced and ran through the application of death penalty in Tang-Dynasty. In the end, we would find that ideas impacting the application of death in Tang Dyansty got ahead of its previous dynasties, also embodied rules of law guiding role in ideology, which were forceful restraint for both judges and rulers and affected deeply the application of law activities.The second part focuses on the relating rules of procedure of application of death penalty in Tang Dynasty. The procedure of death penalty refers to the process that court and judges apply death rules to concrete cases and offenders. This part investigates rules of procedure of application of death penalty, including jurisdictional rules of first trial, retrial, equitable comment and fuzou. Which would help us understand the operation of death penalty. Meanwhile we would find values of the procedure which has two aspects: firstly, guiding relating institutions and judges smoothly accomplishing the judgement mission; secondly, motivating all the judicial resources to deal with capital cases through division and cooperation, preventing the occurance of mistakes, hoping for get good results.The third part discusses the status of the application of death penalty. Firstly, gathers and sorts out capital cases existing in historic record relating to Tang Dynasty, and classifies them into three categories including accusations above insurgency, officials crime of bribery and the other accusations category according to accusations. In this part, we would find that accusation category which was most frequently applied by death penalty was accusations above insurgency, the more frequently apllied one was officials crime of bribery; applicable targets were officials; the quantity of application of death penalty in the latter period was larger than the former period of Tang Dynasty. There are profound reasons uderling the given status. Firstly, in acient society, political society was considered as the only unique existence and presentation format of society, political power was the absolute social domination and the center. And the core of the political power was kingship, as a result, the core of politics was defending the kingship in ancient times, accordingly, the purpose of formulating accusations of above insurgency was defending kingship. However. The acient king power could not become powerful because of deficient base of power, which brought with the frequent changs of kingship. So, rulers paid special attention to accusations above insurgency, which became the typical accussions that the death penalty most frequently occured to. In fact, the accusations above insurgency happened frequently in Tang Dynasty. Secondly, rulers in Tang Dyansty were clear-head about officials crime of bribery, were aware of the negative effects both for the country and offcials themselves, so they adopted rigid measures, regulated that punishments of officials crime of bribery should strictly accord to Tang Code and generally would not be exempted. The given status is proved by the gathered materials. Secondly, reasons of officials becoming the main group who were frequently executed were that the role of officials was highly paid attention to,especially, regulations of officials were put premium on. Thirdly, in the former period of Tang Dynasty, society was stable, classes contradiction was not serious, but after the An-Shi rebellion, the situation drasticly changed, social conditions were getting worse, criminalities were growing, which brought with the growing number of execution. The primary study would help us have a direct cognition of the appilcation death penalty in Tang Dyansty.