The Impact And Regulation Of Public Opinion Toward Criminal Justice

With the rapid development of the Information Age,public opinion plays a more and more important role on society,and in many situations,it even replaced the judicial justice. Compare to judicial justice,people are more tend to favor public opinion. As one of the modern social state under the law system,judicial justice and the rule of law must have full independence,which should not be affected by any man-made factors. In China,a country has a history of five thousand years of civilization,games always exist in law,sensibility,and reasonableness. Public opinion always makes an influence on judicial process on different level,especially in the process of some significant criminal cases,due to the judicial process severely disrupted by public opinion deeply.In such a case,originally it’s power lead the public opinion,then developed to public counter-react to the power,which pushing power in passive and difficult to return to the rational and regular state,finally let the judicial results tend to follow the public opinion direction. It is not only the public opinion playing an important role,more reflecting the deference of law under the pressure of compliant.In the face of such a social reality,we should soberly realize that public opinion is not constant,due to its flexible position. In order to avoid the potential affect of the public opinion to the judicial process,it must be reasonably restricted and guided to highlight the judicial authority.At the beginning of the paper the author raises up the influence of public opinion to criminal trials through two famous criminal case and analyze the types of public opinion. Compared the interrelation between public opinion of popular indignation and of public mercy,thus do deep analysis of the point: the influence to conviction and sentencing from public opinion. At the main argument of this thesis,which demonstrates the influence and the reason of public opinion to criminal trials in four aspects: The public opinion itself has the supervision function to criminal procedure;the traditional Chinese political culture pays more attention to the public opinion;judicature is not fully open and independent yet; the press and media practitionersbring too much intervention to judicature. Then analyze the reason of alienation of public opinion supervision during criminal trials in three aspects: different thing modes,different evaluation criterion and different value orientation. Study the good experience of public opinion from regulation of other countries and explore the public opinion supervising system during criminal trials from the main countries of Anglo-American legal system and civil law system.The third part is the deep analysis to the problems occurred between social public opinion supervision and judicial independence,thereby seeking the balance between public opinion supervision and judicial procedure,weakening the influence of public opinion supervision to criminal trial through the joint efforts from both the media and the judicial authorities,so that the “trial in accordance with the law” during judicial procedure is more fair and equitable. In this thesis,there are more practical suggestions of how to reduce the adverse impact to the criminal trial from public opinion, network public opinion,media public opinion; and perfect measures of how to strengthen the judicial initiative,enhance the credibility of judicial administration,improve and perfect the criminal judicial procedure.