Study On Some Problems Of "Causing Death" In Chinese Criminal Law

In the trend of historical development, China has adopted strict laws and cruel punishments all the while in the action of "causing death". Chinese Criminal Law of 1997 edition made progress in the legal regulation of "causing death", which abolished death penalty rules of partial criminal acts. The action complied with the trend of historical development in objective aspect and could better embody the spirit of the principle of legality. Criminal Law of our nation makes more beneficial balance between the interests of human rights protection and law interest protection, and it sets favorable trial standards for punishment fitting the crime in juridical practices. According to the previous theoretical researches, Chinese Criminal Law has many weaknesses in a variety of aspects such as statutory sentence setting, objective aspect, legislative pattern and etc. And it is also thought that the theoretical disputes in the field of criminal jurisprudence are caused by the imperfect legislative status. Most importantly, the same act will lead to the different punishments in the juridical practices because of the aspects like different subjectivity, which greatly raises the social concerns and outrages the society. Further, it even causes the distrust of the social public to the impartial law enforcement of judicial offices and the hostile speculations to the justice personnel of judicial offices to some extent.Except for the theories of Chinese criminal law, the "causing death" legal regulation isn’t systematically discussed and illuminated in criminal law theories of other countries as well. Basically, they only discuss the specific acts of a case solely, which must lead to a lack of systematic and ordered judgments and affirmations for the "causing death" phenomenon as a whole so that the "similar cases, but different judgments" phenomenon is existing among the various cases. Therefore, aimed at the systematic researches of "causing death" in the Criminal Law, to analyze its problems and relevant theories has relatively practical significances and theoretical values. After deeply analyzing and studying this phenomenon, the judgment criteria and internal relations of "causing death" regulation can be concluded, which provide the favorable theoretical basis of further improvements on abolishment of death penalty article in Chinese Criminal Law and relevant "causing death" stipulations. Meanwhile, under the premise of perfect theories, the criminal law can systematically judge the "causing death" cases, which makes relevant similar cases have certain ladder-like and scientific natures and make penalty applications be able to unify and harmonize.Except for introduction and conclusion, this paper is divided into three parts:The first part presents the articles of law and classifies the "causing death" legislative articles about the current situation of legislation of "causing death" regulation in Chinese criminal law. First of all, this paper simply summarizes the national "causing death" legislative stipulations, briefly states the progresses in "causing death" regulation of 1997 Criminal Law compared with that of 1979 Criminal Law and roughly enumerates the chapters related to this regulation in order to divide these legislative articles as a whole. Secondly, starting from the article features, this paper divides the types of "causing death" articles from three different perspectives and the types include large differences of penalty configurations, different death-result evaluation systems and disparate express terms in subjective aspect. Through that, the cognitions of different "causing death" article types could be deepened from a macroscopic view and it can pave the way for the subsequent legislative improvement possibility. Finally, the first part lists the specific articles related to "causing death" regulation and presents as a whole the detailed stipulations of this phenomenon in the complete Criminal Law.The contents of this part classified this phenomenon is mainly from three aspects, the primary bases are respectively subjective state, crime type and term nature. From the aspect of subjective state, the subjectivity related to "causing death" articles can be distributed into intentional and negligent acts, including intentional type, negligent type and mixed type. From the perspective of crime type, the regulations referred mainly incorporate aggregated consequential offense, transforming offense and contained offense. As for the term nature aspect, the terms are mainly divided into caution regulation, legal fiction and legal presumption. Through these three different directions and content classifications, it leads to a new and better vertical understanding about the "causing death" articles in Criminal Law, which provides the foundation for the legislative improvements possibly referred in some future direction or charge.The second part states the common types of "causing death" in national juridical practices. With the diverse causes of death, special constitutions of victims and specific environments, which are three different scenes of "causing death" acts taken by criminals in our national juridical practices, this part specifically and vividly illustrates the huge influences of the weaknesses existed in "causing death" regulation on punishment fitting the crime and criminal liabilities of different actors in juridical practices by the recently popular analysis of causation theory.The third part illustrates the legislative weaknesses and improvement suggestions of "causing death" regulation in Chinese Criminal Law in detail. First of all, this part analyzes the legislative weaknesses of "causing death" regulation mainly from subjective aspect and statutory sentence setting aspects. Secondly, the paper states that the subjective states and relevant measurements of penalty are not indicated in the subjective aspect, specifically listing the Article 133 Traffic Accident Crime, Article 144 Crime of Poisonous and Harmful Food Production and Sales as well as Article 238 Crime of False Imprisonment to explain. Thirdly, the problems of statutory sentence setting primarily contain stepwise features like punishment increase, absolute death penalty existing, unreasonable statutory punishment configurations of contained offence and aggregated consequential offense, statutory punishment applicable for both "causing death" regulation and other damaged results as well as unscientific accessory punishment setting in statutory punishment. Finally, in the specific improvement aspect, the corresponding problems stated in the paper have different solutions. The relatively specific measures include "causing death" crime form definition, reasonable "causing death" statutory sentence setting, reasonable accessory punishment setting based on the situations of safety accidents causing death and social labor punishment addition for "causing death" crimes who damage the public interest. It should say that in the public-interest-damage cases, the author suggests additionally setting the social labor punishment to accord with national conditions, which is a progress referring to Hong Kong measures of governing the society.