On The Limits Of The Judicial Death Penalty

In recent years, with the advancement of national legal system and the strengthening of citizens'legal consciousness, the death penalty gradually caused extensive attention of the whole society. For the restriction and reduction of death penalty implement, the international community has signed The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which stipulates the death penalty only applies to the most serious crime. Based on the national conditions and traditional legal culture, some countries have abolished death penalty. It is up to the government to let people feel the humanism, so the reduction or abolishment of death penalty is the progressive direction of punishment civilization. According to Death Sentences and Executions released by the United Nations in 2010, 95 countries have unconditionally abolished death penalty and the retentionist countries mostly concentrated in Africa and Asia. As the Amendment VIII to the Criminal Law of the People's Republic of China passed, the reduction and restriction of death penalty has once again become the social focus. This amendment is a useful exploration and positive progress for the legislative reform and it will also help Chinese judicial system become more scientific. The death penalty implement has been the concerns in the law science community in recent years. The amendment canceled 13 death penalty charges at a time, whose strength is far greater than all the previous criminal law amendments. It shows that the death penalty system in China will move to the more prudent and more civilized direction. The basic consensus to death penalty in the judicial practice and criminal law field is the limitation and cautious implement of it. Such consensus is based on China's politics, economy, culture and civic conception.How to restrict the implement of death penalty from the judicial level is the priority of this research. The writer will start from the status of death penalty to analyze the rationality, the necessity and the problems of current death penalty, so as to reduce the implement of death penalty through judicatory ways.The death penalty is an important problem in the research of punishment system, which can be studied from different aspects and angles. Either in the macroscopic angle or in the microscopic angle; either from the criminal law concept or from the legislative and judicial practice; either expounded theoretically or applied practically. The research methods should be various for the complexity of this problem. Based on the foregoing, the research methods are as follows:1. Experience summarization. The scholars at home and abroad have expounded the limitation of death penalty from various angles and aspects, which are the basis and reference for my research. So I will take the essence and discard the dregs from the previous researches to serve my study.2. Combination of theory and practice. Most scholars studied death penalty from the macroscopic angle basing on the theoretical aspect. The limitations of their research lie in the problem of abolishment of death penalty or not. The first chapter in my thesis is not the focus, while the second part is the core of this thesis. This thesis will study the judicial ways to restrict the implement of death penalty basing on the rationality and necessity of retaining the death penalty.