A Study On Restricting Death Penalty

In accordance with Amendment IX to the Criminal Law(draft) published on November 3, 2014, China decided to cancel 9 charges of death penalty, which indicates that the solid step progressed to China’s death penalty reform. In fact, in order to comply with the global trend of the abolition of the death penalty, as early as Amendment VIII to the Criminal Law of publication that China put forward the concept of restrictions on reprieve commutation in it, at that time this system is undoubtedly like injecting cardiac into China for the predicament of death penalty reform. However, restrictions on reprieve commutation system implemented has more than three years, but in practice there are often still some disagreements about restrictions on reprieve commutation due to the different understanding on restrictions on reprieve commutation and the punishment intensity of restrictions on reprieve commutation. In this paper, there are three typical cases for restrictions on reprieve commutation, in order to clarify the application of the stipulates of reprieve restrictions on commutation and punishment intensity case of reprieve restrictions on commutation by case analysis. In addition, this paper combined with the enlightenment from a typical case analysis, then demonstrated the rationality of reprieve restrictions on commutation’s retrospective effect, also organized the problems that the commutation system of execution of punishment is too general and applicable scope is too narrow, in order to prevent such problems make the system worse in future, to avoid the risk of reprieve commutation limit become a ‘dead letter’, some proposals to differentiae the appropriate scope of reprieve commutation limit and properly broaden the appropriate scope of reprieve commutation limit, which be some opinions to the further research theory and practice of reprieve restrictions on commutation system.