Public Opinion Trial And Its Prevention

Public opinion in the field of justice is a popular will which reflects the external social values of justice, and it is the public justice demands to judicial system, judicial action and judicial result. Our country is being in the social transition period, various contradictions are intertwined collision. With the improvement of rules of law in our country, judicial treatment results of some litigation have caused wide public concerns, therefore, justice and public opinion is also showing unprecedented fierce collision. There are some characteristics of public opinion, such as morality, volatility, irrational, vulnerable to maneuvering and non-professional. Now, legal system in our country is not yet perfect, people tend to create a strong public opinion offensive and it can be even lead to public opinion trial, which could interfere the independence of trial.Public opinion is the universal justice demands of popular, while public opinion trial is suspected to interfere with the independence of the judiciary. Based on a series of typical cases of public opinion trial occurring in recent years, we find that most of these cases belong to criminal case, like cases of conflicts between officer and ordinary people, dignitary identity, social livelihood and so on, which are often easy to cause the public opinion trial. There are some complicated reasons, such as the judicial is lack of trust to the public; in recent years, with the rising wave of judicial democratization, Supreme People’s Court has held activities "Striving for the good court and being a good judge to the people’s satisfactory", however, without due process, public opinion accessing to judicial is easy to cause public opinion trial; social changes caused a lot of disputes, but the ability of solving these problems by judicial is limited; on the lack of strict industry standard constraints, the mass media often appear the dislocation of the supervision by public opinion, and then become a public opinion trial boosting agent.There are some kinds of negative social influence of public opinion trial. Without due process into judicial, public opinion which is irrational and non-professional can affect judicial independence, obstruct of justice and lead to damage judicial authority. It not only violates the principle of adjudication of justice, but also influences the stability and certainty of the law. What seems to be conform to the trend of the judicial democratization, in fact, it is the alienation of the supervision of public opinion. As a result, it is against the process of the construction of the legal system.In order to prevent public opinion trial, we need to pass legislation to establish legal system for public opinion into judicial. For justice, above all, we should insist on the principle of independent trial, which is the premise of preventing public opinion trial. Secondly, judicial shall keep the proper distance with public opinion and grasp the degree between them; at the same time, we should strict judicial procedure to ensure procedure justice and strengthen the judicial openness, then perfect the judicial response mechanism of public opinion, improve People’s juror system to make public opinion through proper channels into justice. Finally, we should seek the balance of the media supervision and judicial. To guarantee freedom of the press and media supervision and seek the common values that the media and the judicial pursuit of——fair and just. So we should regulate the media through a variety of ways.