Party Factor In Contemporary Chinese Judicial Decision

In judicial practice, parties’ factors exert profound influences on judges’ judgment. Awards of 209 serious cases in Shanxi province in recent years are taken as samples to done quantitative statistics. On this basis, a research method of empirical analysis is used to explore regularities of parties’ factors’ influences on judicial judgment. Besides, reasons for the regularity are analyzed, so as to deepen understanding of judicial judgment behaviors.In Chinese area of contemporary criminal justice, the phenomenon that a same case has different convictions is increasingly criticized by various groups of society.In the 1980 s, Donald Blake, an American jurist, noticed social structure’s influences on judges’ judgment and proposed a famous law number theory. He proposed that in specific and micro judiciary activities, a social structural analysis of cases waiting to be processed should be done.Exploring cases’ social structures’ influences on judiciary judgment requires a set of scientific statistics method. By analyzing Professor Bai Jianjun’s method for exploring criminal penalty’s quantitative analysis, learning from Doctor Hu Changming’s concept of punishment degree, connecting with judgment practices of serious case, and taking year as unit in fixed-term imprisonment, a unified standard can be established according to types of criminal penalty. Besides, a value for quantitative analysis is fixed, so as to measuring the criminal penalty’s degree of each criminal defendant. Social structures of 209 criminal awards, which involves 265 criminal defendants and 214 criminal victims, are counted. Besides, punishment degree’s calculation model is used to analyze influences of defendants’ injury motivation, gender, age, domicile, education background, surrender state on judgment.Also, influences of victims’ relatives’ attitudes towards defendants on judgment are also explored. Research suggests that a case’s social structure does influence a judge’s judgment.Regularities of statutory social structures’ influences are as follows: criminal punishment degrees of an underage defendant are low, which is in line with constitution’s protection of underage rights; defendants who compensate victims and their relatives have evidently low punishment degrees, which is also in line with rules in constitution.Influences exerted by factors of non-statutory social structures have following regularities: male defendants are punished more seriously than female defendants; and young adults are punished more seriously than the underage and old, on the wholeforming a trend which is big at both ends but small in the middle. Besides, defendants from rural areas are punished more seriously than urban defendants, and average punishment degrees are in inverse proportion to defendants’ education degrees.