The Report Of Fuyang Procuratorial Organs Criminal Reconciliation Practice

Despite its contribution in fighting crime and maintaining social stability, traditional way of solving criminal cases centering on the determination of criminal liability and penalty is faced with various challenges today. Among them are too severe punishment, heavy burden on the related departments and prisons, cross-infection at places of detention, poor reform effect for the offenders, insufficient compensation for damages suffered by the victims and failure in relieving their pains, difficulty in solving the conflict and restoring normal relationship between the victim and the offender. In this context, criminal reconciliation system combining protection of the rights of the victim, return of the offender to society, solution of conflicts and recovery of relationship between the two sides is attracting more and more attention and becoming a hot topic for research in both academic and practice arena. While criminal reconciliation system has not yet been formally established in Chinese legislation, the legal administrative departments have taken a first step in an active exploration of new ways of handling criminal cases. And procuratorates of all levels are at the front of this movement, carrying out operations as well as making regulative documents, some of them even establishing corresponding mechanisms.Fuyang City Procuratorate of Anhui Province in early 2008, prosecutors in the province carried out the first pilot project of criminal reconciliation, and developed a "Fuyang City Procuratorate on the application of criminal prosecution in the guidance of criminal reconciliation." To June 2010, the city has a total of two prosecutors handling criminal cases for criminal reconciliation 242 pieces 254 people for the main types of traffic accident cases, and intentional injuries (minor injuries). Overall, the application is still very limited number of cases, with smaller increases each year. Practice, the vast majority of cases the auspices of the parties is under the mediation of a third party settlement, among these are presided over by the prosecution mediate the majority. Settle the case for the prosecution's handling of return key to dismiss the case the public security organs and recommended not to prosecute and the prosecution of three recommendations to the court for sentencing. Fuyang City, the prosecution in a criminal trial in the reconciliation, strictly control the scope of the criminal reconciliation and suitable conditions, norms applicable procedures, and established a system of tracking return visits, and achieved positive results. It appears that criminal reconciliation has a positive effect on many issues such as conflict solution, social relationship restoration, victim right protection, prompt and sufficient compensation for victims, offender's return to society, effective prevention of more offences, and overall improvement of litigation efficiency and reduction of litigation cost. The paper also analyzes common problems existing in the practice of criminal reconciliation such as the vagueness of the application standard, narrow application scope, improper measures taken by the procuratorate in presiding over criminal reconciliation, the practice of concluding the case by sending the case back to public security organ as a dismissed case contrary to the stipulation of law, the absence of supervision over the application of criminal reconciliation, etc.. For further improvement of criminal reconciliation system, I present some suggestions and ideas:I propose that conditions for the application of criminal reconciliation should include 4 aspects, namely, clarity of case facts, consent of both parties, confession and repentance of the offender and true forgiveness of the victims. On defining the scope of the application of criminal reconciliation, the paper analyzes two factors, namely, the seriousness of the offence and the type of the offence; the paper opposes the view of defining scope of application according to the simple division of minor crime and felony; instead the scope of application should be defined using a method combining strict legislative stipulation with judicial discretion. Principles on application of criminal reconciliation should be made in legislation; types of cases not allowed for the application of criminal reconciliation should be excluded; other cases should be left for judicial discretion according to the special circumstances of the case. The paper believes that the People's Mediation Organization is a suitable choice for presiding over criminal reconciliation and suggests that through construction of procuratorate-meditation interconnecting mechanism we can improve success rates of criminal reconciliation, complement for the lack of legal administrative resources and reducing the pressure upon the procuratorates. The paper also suggests further improvement of non-prosecution system, construction of criminal reconciliation-measurement of penalty suggestion interconnecting mechanism and regulation of the ways of concluding criminal reconciliation cases. On the supervision mechanism of criminal reconciliation, The paper suggests by combining internal supervision with external supervision and using methods such as strengthening prior- reconciliation supervision & after -reconciliation supervision, introducing of people' overseer system and adopting open review on non-prosecution case system, we can improve supervision on procuratorial criminal reconciliation work and ensure legal justice in the application of criminal reconciliation.