An Analysis On The Legal Issues Regarding Communation For Chinese Inmates

The commutation system in China is a crucial and frequent judicial activity in the penalty execution, which takes an extreme significant position in the legal practice. Termers’ penalties are relieved pursuant the relative laws and considering their confession and repentance. The Penal Law in China stimulates that commutation is appropriate for Freiheitsstrafe which consists of criminal detention, public surveillance, fixed-term imprisonment and life imprisonment, as well as death penalty with a reprieve, deprivation of political rights, pecuniary penalty, etc. The implementation of commutation system effectively mobilizes the rehabilitation, helps the termers maintain a hopeful outlook and apply self-management, in order to facilitate the stabilization of the prison’s order. Meanwhile, the commutation system contributes to avoid heavy-handed penalties and to save the judicial resources. Some termers whose personal dangerousness has been minimized or controlled via the rehabilitation have no occasion to continue their penalties due to the non-necessity and the waste of resources, which also accords with the criminal educational aim of the modern penalty system. In China, commutation system is also an institutional measure to implement the temper justice with mercy policy. Practice has proved that the commutation system is playing a more and more important role in the penalty implementation and has been widely accepted and applied in the modern penalty system.Despite the importance of the commutation system, multiple problems have emerged in its implementation. In this paper, discussions and suggestions of Chinese commutation system were carried out in order to perfect the commutation system.Chapter 1, via the summarization of Chinese commutation system and declaration of the commutation concept, the requirements of commutation on the basis of Chinese Panel Law, Prison Law and other relative laws and judicial interpretation have been cleared and defined, as well as the foreign laws and implementation of commutation, to lay the foundation of the further discussion.Chapter 2, the current status of Chinese commutation system has been evaluated, and detailed elaboration of the commutation’s efficacy, condition, and procedure has been applied.Chapter 3, based on the commutation status evaluation, some problems of Chinese commutation system in both procedure and substantiality dimension have emerged. The problems consist of but are not limited to what have been listed below. Firstly, the relative regulations andlaws are too principled and general. Furthermore, there is not enough scientific operation mechanism to rule the commutation. Besides, the identification of commutation condition is vague.And, the commutation condition is improper and simplex. Last but not least, the commutation-testing and commutation-cancelling system are incomplete.Chapter 4, according to the problems analyzed in the previous chapters, some suggestions aimed to perfect the commutation system have been proposed. The commutation procedures need to be perfected, the conditions and requirements of commutation need to be cleared, the areal variation of commutation needs to be minimized, and the commutation-testing and commutation-cancelling system need to be set and applied.