On China's Criminal Evidence System

This article describes criminal evidence system of China (CESC)generally and concisely in four parts, which are an elementary introduction to criminal evidence system (CES), overview of CESC's historical development, sources of CESC and contents of CESC.CES is a whole system of rules about criminal evidences. It is regulated or verified by laws. There are basic principles about criminal evidences and concrete rules of evidence application in it. According to criminal procedure phase, it includes evidence collection system, evidence production system and evidence verification system.CES is an important part of national legal system. Besides the fundamental characteristic of social class, it has the other five characteristics that are applying national scope, legality of exsistent foundation, specialty of content, sequencing feature of content combination and gathering of showing forms.CES is very important. It is the most powerful safeguards for realization of criminal laws and prevents the innocents from being prosecuted. It embodies legal state of a country. It is interrelated to human rights protection and constitutionality progression.CES belongs to superstructure category. It develops and changes with the influence of social history, social civilization, and degree of legal study. There are different CES in different historical type of countries. There are three types of CES, system of divinity evidence, system of legal evidence and doctrine of discretional evaluation of evidence.The historical development of CESC goes through three periods, ancient slavery and feudal CES, modern semi-feudal and semi-colonial CES, as well as forming and development of New China's CES. It shows that current CESC is not only critical and progressive but also successive and innovated comparing to the history's.Sources of CESC are formulating methods and external showing forms of CESC's legal norms. They are formal and valid sources. It is same as the most contemporary pays du droit ecrit that China takes statutes as sources of CES. Sources of CES reflect contents of CES, while contents of CES determine sources of CES. CESC has five showing forms, which are principle source of constitution, basic source of criminal procedure law, other department laws and special criminal rales, legal construction, and factual source of CPC 's policies.Contents of CESC are concrete contents of CES regulated by Chinese laws. It consists of three parts, which are evidence collection, evidence production and evidence verification. In china, criminal evidences are facts of objectivity, relevancy and authenticity in content, legitimacy in origin, and legality in form.Evidence collection system is the gathering of legal rules about evidence collection, which is a legal behavior of investigating and obtaining evidences. The aim of evidence collection is ascertaining criminal facts, catching suspects and confirming crimes. Subjects of evidence collection are those state organizations and people that are entitled to collect evidences. Evidence collection must be done in accordance with laws. Exact a confession by torture and other unlawful methods such as threatening, inducement and trickery must be forbidden in evidence collection Effect of unlawfully collected evidence should be entirely excluded from applying in deciding a case. Collection of different kinds of evidences depends on different methods. All the people that take up investigation and inquiries of Public Security Organizations, Prosecutorial Organizations and People's Courts (P.P.P.) should have status of witness. In order to prevent witnesses from refusing and evading bearing testimony, compelling bearing witness should be enacted, The same free degree of evidence collection as P.P.P. 's should be entitled to lawyer except for cases related to state secretsand security.Evidence production system is the gathering of legal rules about evidence production, which is a legal behavior of lodging proof People's Courts to bear out claims. The principle "who claims,...