On The Perfection Of Fast-Track Procedure For Criminal Cases

The Decision onAuthorizing the Supreme People’s Court and the People’s Procuratorate to Launch the Pilot Program of Fast-track Sentencing Procedure for Criminal Cases in Certain Areas passed by Standing Committee of the Twelfth National People’s Congress has authorized the Supreme People’s Court and Supreme People’s Procuratorate to launch the pilot program of fast-track sentencing procedure for criminal cases in 18 cities such as Beijing. The proposal of fast-track sentencing procedure for criminal case is based on a variety of background and plight of criminal justice. The number of criminal cases has been increasing year by year and in the meantime the judicial resource is scarce and the power of judges is insufficient. In face of current predicament, scholars and judicial field have been trying to reform, explore in hope to resolve the judicial difficulties and improve lawsuit efficiency. According to the Decision, the pilot rules are made by the Supreme People’s Court and the Supreme People’s Procuratorate and submitted to the Standing Committee of National People’s Congress for the record. After two years of experiment, those laws that have been proved to be feasible should be improved further; otherwise the related laws and regulations should be resumed.Fast-track sentencing procedure for criminal cases is introduced based on protection of human rights. The new procedure has brought some positive effects in practice, but there are still some problems that may be caused by the imperfection of the system itself or the roadblocks in the way. For instance, expanding the applicable reasons for not being heard in public will enlarge the judges’ discretion, which will result in unfair trials. Excessive pursuit of lawsuit efficiency will force an innocent man make guilty statements. Undeveloped safeguarding system for victim’s litigation rights leads to more appeals through petition by victims. As it stands now, fast-track sentencing procedure has achieved some positive results to some extent in operation, but it also has some problems such as low efficiency, limited scope of application, lack of realistic simplicity, low quality of legal aid and inadequate supporting measures. The subsequent reforms should standardize and improve fast-track sentencing procedures by further perfecting implementation details, enhancing safeguarding or the rights of suspects and improving supporting measurements. Based on the implementation of the fast-track sentencing procedure for criminal cases adopted by K court, this paper elaborates the background of the introduction of fast-track sentencing procedure for criminal cases and discusses from the perspectives of the applications scope, features and feasibility of fast-track sentencing procedure for criminal cases. By comparing the related rules of fast-track sentencing procedure for criminal cases between main countries that adopt two legal systems, this paper summarizes their common grounds in terms of application scope and criminal punishment as well as the difference in the defendant’s admission of guilty, after which this paper makes a comprehensive research by comparing China’s status quo of application, scope of application, principles and application procedures of fast-track sentencing procedure for criminal cases. Currently, China’s establishment of fast-track sentencing procedure for criminal cases is still plighted by some problems such as limited scope of application of this system, insufficient of supporting laws in criminal investigations, defects of subject starting procedures and the imperfect of safeguarding system for defendant’s rights. The above issues are directly related to the real working effects of fast-track sentencing procedure for criminal case and thus it is worth in-depth studying. The author puts forward some valuable suggestions for building fast-track sentencing procedure for criminal cases with Chinese features from the perspectives of how to appropriately allocate the startup of fast-track sentencing procedure for criminal cases, how to perfect the scope of fast-track procedure of not being heard in public and how to construct the human rights safeguarding system and its supporting measurements by comparing the laws at home and abroad and learning from the advantages of western laws. Hopefully, this paper will make some contribution to the construction and improvement of China’s fast-track sentencing procedure for criminal cases.