On The Death Penalty Legislation And Its Reasonable Development Direction Of China

Death penalty always stands first in the penalties through the ancient and heavy and long history. In part of the death penalty, each country has evolved out from abuse to cautious and palliatory execution. Today human rights are asked to respect and civilization should be advocated, so quite a few countries have completely abandoned the penalty.The death penalty has a long history of development from its rising to abusing to dying. In people's mind, it ever existed in the nature of things. However, people also questioned its existence, Beccaria, a famous Italian legist, was the fist person who put forward to abolish the death penalty in 1764. Ever since, the time-consuming dispute on keeping or abolishing the penalty has lasted more than 200 years, and has not stopped until now. In the timeless debate, the two sides that hold the opposite views have continuously refreshed their arguments that end without either side winning. Nevertheless, what attracts people's attentions is that both sides can draw entirely different conclusions from many common points. Up to now, the dispute on the death penalty is hotly going on in the circles of criminal law, sociology and other ideology in western countries.Undoubtedly, today abolishing the death penalty has become an international trend and a goal that some organizations of human rights in international community request and strive for. In China, keeping or abolishing the death penalty may be still considered a non- controversial problem, even not considered a dispute at all, but we have to face the severe and solemn problem to recognize and evaluate it. The problem will make a difference to our criminal lawmaking reform, and to whether or not we should increase applicable evaluation on the execution in our present criminal judicature. After we study the evolution of contemporary China's policies on the execution, it is not difficult to see that our legislation for the penalty is proceeding along "keeping and restricting the execution——noticeable trend of expanding it——weakening the expansion", assuming the three distinct phases. At present, China has no way to be listed in the states of seeking to abolish the penalty, because there are many profound factors in history, reality, politics, economy, culture and ethics, which limit the steps of abating the penalty. Internationally, abolishing the death penalty has already become the global trend, under the impetus of human rights movement, the national quality in most countries is hence much improved, more and more people tend to adopt a negative attitude toward the great penalty, in other words, abating the death penalty will develop stronger and stronger. Whether the death legislation will return to the expanding or strictly restricting the death penalty is an unavoidably significant choice that the national death policy must face. From the higher point of human development, the utility of keeping or abolishing the death penalty should be subjected to humanism.However, it is a long-term and arduous task to abolish the penalty which is not only controlled by economic base but also by its superstructure. With the persistent progress of human civilization and national quality, it is foreseeable that the death penalty will be ruled out from the criminal law and it will become an inevitable trend in the development of Chinese criminal law and a sole choice of history progress.