Confession And Misjudge Criminal Cases

Misjudged criminal cases appear frequently in China recent years, such as "She Xianglin case"(1994) in Hubei, "Du Peiwu case"(1998) in Yunnan, "Li Jiuming case"(2002) in Hebei, "Zhang’s case "(2003) in Zhejiang, which draw nationwide attention. These cases make the study of misjudged criminal cases more popular among reserchers. Confession is a hot spot of misjudged criminal case research and discussion. In ancient China, "Crime comes from confession" is the central idea of criminal judgement, which shape the pattern of criminal charge into "Confession centrism", which make confession "the king of evidence". This article analysis "Du peiwu case" in Yunnan, "She Xianglin case" in Hubei and "Huugjilt case" in Inner Mongolia and make following conclusions:The investigating authorities sometimes using illegal methods in order to obtain confessions, and those confessions obtained by illegal methods are mostly untruth. Those false confessions cannot be excluded by effective mechanisms, they march directly to the trial and mislead the judge to make incorrect judgement. In order to solve those problems above, the author offer five aspects of suggestions on confession mechanism:granting "Right to silence" to the accused or suspects, to establish "attorney present when questioning" mechanism, to improve illegal confession exclusion mechanism, to improve "video and audio" recording mechanism during interrogation, to improve rules of confession enhancement. Actions of obtaining illegal confession by investigating authorities will be restrained by the improvement of those five aspects. Authenticity and legality of confessions could be guaranteed, and the trial will not be mislead by false confessions. Improvement of those aspects will also ensure the use and obtaining of confessions are legal, and exclude illegal confessions in time, to ensure the purity of criminal trial, and to reach the ultimate goal of reducing misjudged crimial cases.