Study On The Acquittals

Criminal judicial system is essential to all countries that comply with the rule of law. The dual missions of a well-organized criminal judicial system are effective control of crime solid and protection of human rights. In the 2004 Amendment to the Constitution, the clause that "the country respects and protects human rights" was included, which indicates that our country is making further efforts to establish the concept of human rights protection in judicial system, and is trying to correct previous criminal punishment-oriented concept.acquittal is an important form of verdict for criminal procedure. It reflects how a country balance between "fairness and efficiency". This balancing further mirrors the level of a country’s execution of rule of law. Unfortunately, the percentage of acquittal is extremely low among all the judgement of our court system. In 2014, only 0.07% of all the cases reach not-guilty decisions, which indicates that it is almost certain for defendants to receive a guilty decision. This is a rather disturbing phenomenon. After all, when courts make only guilty verdicts, the protection of human rights and the justice of judicial process tend to be compromised.Base on the observation above, this thesis-focusing on current situation in China and modern criminal procedural model- discusses acquittal from 6 aspects.In part one, this thesis investigates acquittals in China. After looking into data from between 2001 to 2014, this thesis discloses the extremely low ratio of acquittals.In part two, this thesis gives implications on the low ratio of acquittals from the standpoint of procedural law. After analysis, this thesis observes that the main reasons include but are not limited with:1、 misplacement of relationships among Public Security Organizations, Prosecutorial Organizations and People’s Courts;2、 performance appraisals of procedural related special agencies are misleading;3、 lack of efficient correction procedure for wrongful decisions;4、long-existing "presumption of guilty" concept.In part three, this thesis inspects the practice of acquittals in other countries. By observation of practices beyond our jurisdiction, this thesis provides experiences for establishing a suitable procedure to produce acquittals in China.In part four, this thesis provides researches concerning the rationality and its impact on not-guilty decision of procedural morph of acquittal in judicial process.In part five, this thesis explains the harm of the extremely low ratio of acquittals. Acquittals are in conformity with "in dubio pro reo". The extremely low ratio of acquittal is a detriment to the protection of human rights. In the scenario of cases with unclear facts, claiming defendants guilty is prong to wrongful decisions, which will ultimately damage the credibility of judicial system. Also, the low ratio of acquittal may cause waste of judicial resources, and harm due process principle.In part six, this thesis presents basic route to produce reasonable acquittals. The route includes but is not limited with:1、Most basic, among other things, this thesis suggests a rearrangement of the placement among policemen, prosecutors and judges to establish a more justifiable relationship between them;2、Following that, the performance appraisals of procedural related special agencies should be reformed;3、A thorough execution of "in dubio pro reo" concepts.By implementing this route, acquittals will have better opportunity to realize its role in achieving judicial justice, better human rights protection, and further help narrow the gap between judicial system of China and those with more advanced ones.