On The Enforcement Difficulty Of Fine Penalty And Its Countermeasures

Fine penalty is a kind of penalty that the people’s court sentences the criminals to pay some fine to the nation. It contributes, together with deprivation of political rights, confiscation of property and deportation, to the accessory punishment system of China, and also constitutes the penalty system of China together with all kinds of principal penalty categories. Fine penalty is an old penalty category with a long history of several thousands years. With the development of society and economy, the fine penalty is playing a more and more important role in the penalty system nowadays. One of the basic development trends of penalty in the world is the mitigation of penalties, featured with the extensive implication of fine penalty. Many western countries have made the fine penalty as the principal penalty, which is exemplified by the French Criminal Code and German Criminal Code. The two codes put equal stress on property penalty and freedom penalty and even raise the status of the former to a leading place in the whole penalty system. However, the fine penalty is still an accessory punishment in China’s penalty system, which means it can be enforced either additionally or independently. In practice, the application rate of fine penalty is becoming higher, but the enforcement difficulty of fine penalty still exists as a big trouble to the whole world including China.In China, after the revision of the Criminal Law in 1997, there are 162 charges stipulating the fine penalty for the natural person who has committed crimes, which occupies 40% of the total charges of the law. The stipulation of fine penalty is not only a very important adjustment to China’s criminal punishment structure, but also a reflection of the new trend of this structure. It is undoubtedly an important improvement of legislation in China, but also acts in accordance with the development trend of the world penalty. However, the problems arising from the application of fine penalty are unavoidable, especially the ones in the process of enforcement. In the legal practices, the execution rate of fine cases is usually lower than 1% and the rate of implementation discontinuation is above 90% according to the incomplete statistics. The problem of "unfeasible sentence" is still serious and the deficiency of fine penalty in legislation and jurisdiction is becoming more and more obvious. In order to solve the problem of "enforcement difficulty" and strengthen the effects of fine penalty as well as the authority of criminal law, the enforcement system of fine penalty and the related remedy system should be built immediately.In the first part of this thesis, the author will brief the relevant legislations of fine penalty enforcement at home and abroad and also introduce the date amount fine system, the fine suspended system, fine installment payment system and fine penalty exchanging institution. In the second part, the author will point out some characteristics of fine penalty in legal practices after the three-year empirical study of one district court in Chengdu, capital city of Sichuan Province in western China, like low enforcement rate of fine, paying more before the sentence but fewer after the sentence, the zero enforceable implementation rate and the discontinuation of implementation being the closed mode. In the third part, the author will analyze in detail the reasons of the enforcement difficulty, including the lack of related laws and regulations leading to the enforcement failure, the different enforcement results due to the lack of legal basis, the blind enforcement of fine due to the unknown property status of the target objects and so on. In the fourth part, the author will propose some feasible suggestions to the problem of fine penalty enforcement difficulty so as to find a fundamental solution to the enforcement difficulty.