| Current, our country is in the period of social transition, facing the gap between rich and poor, the structural transformation, the system transition, the reorganization of interests and conceptual change problems and so on. In such a transitional society, it’s full of a variety of social conflicts and unrest. The death penalty is the most important part of the social justice, as the Justice is the last defense line of the social justice. With the enhancement of public legal awareness as well as the rapid development of we-media, the public opinion may become involved in the application of death penalty. That people focus on the individual case is not limited to the facts of the case, but the different interest groups behind the individual case. The case triggers people’s high agreement of the benefits, which has a certain commonality for the interest expression and maintenance. Once mishandled, this part of public opinion is likely to develop into social resentment, grievance against the government, discontented with judicial, and then exacerbated the conflicts between public opinion and judicial.The interaction between the death penalty and public opinion is long-standing. Along with the process of Law-construction, the interaction goes more frequently and more in-depth, then the influence of public opinion on the death penalty cannot be ignored. It seems that there is no obvious regularity or certainty of the influence of public opinion on the death penalty in practice.The author collected and analyzed a large amount of criminal cases which are concerned by public. By analyzing some specific cases focused by public, we can find that in some cases, the influence is obviously and positive while in other cases it’s negative. So it is necessary to clarify the objective influence of public opinion on the death penalty, especially its power, its coverage and how it works etc., and analyze the reasons and rules behind the specific cases. Based on the analyzing of the death penalty cases, we can see that for some brutal murder or malfeasants or the children of the powerful or wealthy, public opinion almost with one voice-demand sentence to death; but when the defendants are vulnerable people, the public opinion may demand light sentence. When public faced some elites who killed people or some new kinds of crime, they had different opinions, and hope the Justice can make a fair judgment to guide the public behavior.It is worth learning the methods that the developed countries handle the interactive relationship between the death penalty and public opinion. In these countries, the public opinion can not directly affect the application of death penalty, but there are some legal ways for the Justice absorbing public opinion. So the public opinion plays a good role in the Justice. Combining the specific situation of China, it helps us to sum up some good methods to promote the positive interaction between the death penalty and public opinion. On one hand, the death penalty should respect public opinion, and identify it, then guide it, but not just to follow it. On the other hand, we need a number of measures to guarantee the positive interaction of death penalty and public opinion. The first is to strengthen the spreading and education of legality to cultivate a good concept of the death penalty for the public, and then change their outmoded notions that the penalty on the killers should be life for a life. The second is to build a good system, to guide the public opinion into the Justice, and make the rational public opinion play its proper role. The third is to standard the media reports, and try to keep the information be true, in order to prevent one-sided or false information to mislead public opinion. The fourth is to insist on fair trial to establish judicial authority, and then the public can trust the Justice. The fifth is to open the criminal justice information, to eliminate public’s misunderstanding, and let powers running in the sunshine. |
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