Conflict And Convergence: Public Opinion And Sentencing Relationship Study

With the development of the media and the increasing attention that people pay to the public occurrences, we may notice that some criminal cases get into our sights and draw lots of people's interests. The publics have the right to deliver their opinions over the cases in the judiciary areas. At the same time, reflecting the publics'supervision over the judiciary. This can cultivate people's legal consciousness and legal ideas as well. However, we should find that there is a conflict between the public opinion and the measurement of penalty. The reason is that there is disagreement between the two over the areas of utterance system and the pursuing target. The judiciary pursues the justice impartial with the legal sense, while the publics are more likely to pursue the pure justice. The publics show their dissatisfaction over the penalties of some topic news, sometimes even requiring resentence the cases. And this make great pressure as well as huge influences over the judiciary. Such as the cases of Xu Ting, Sun Weiming and Deng Yujiao.In fact, the conflicts of the two can be defused and merge together. This essay starts with the basic meanings of the public opinion and the measurement of penalty, analyzes the causes to this problem, and puts forward the countermeasure of the two. From the perspective of the impacts of public opinions have over the penalty, firstly, people get the distorted messages, and then the media misguide the people's views, which combine together to form the public ideas and throw pressures on the judicial authorities through the feedback mechanism. Because of the negative influences it may put on the judiciary, we should positively defuse the conflicts. This is essential to enhance the judiciary authority, eliminate the conflicts between the government and the citizens. As analyses above, it should be completely done among the media, the court and the publics. For the media, it should stick to the ideas of impersonality, fair and sense and pass the total, impersonal messages to the public without avoiding misleading the publics. For the court, it should be open, impartial, interactive and accept the supervision from the public actively. For the publics, understanding, reliance and tolerance are badly need to bear in mind. By doing these, we can successfully and effectively neutralize the conflicts, developing people's positive supervision over the judiciary and achieving the reconciliation of the public opinions and judiciary.