Analysis On Pretrial Meeting System In The Criminal Proceedings

The amended Criminal Proceedings created the pretrial meeting system. As the pretrial preparation procedure, the pretrial meeting system belongs to the intermediate procedure connecting the pretrial and trial procedure, which is of great significance to safeguard the fairness of criminal justice, improve the efficiency thereof and protect the legitimate rights and interests of the parties concerned.However, after its coming into the law, the provisions on the system are inattentive and general, and have defects in system orientation, legal effect and operating procedures. The judicial practice after the implementation of the amended Criminal Proceeding in two years also shows that the current pretrial system is unable to play its proper functions, and unable to carry the value of fairness and efficiency. In the meanwhile, the research on pretrial system in the theoretical circle is relatively weak. For this reason, the author begins with theory and practice, and makes systematic review and analysis on the research, definition mechanism and implementing status quo of the pretrial system. This paper is composed of five parts.Part One is introduction, proposing the problem. This part deeply cards the domestic and foreign status quo of the research on the current pretrial system. The pretrial system in our country rises to the judicial system from theoretical concept, experiencing the introduction and exploration of the experts and scholars into the foreign similar system in the early time, the broad research prior to the amendment on the criminal proceeding as well as the refined research in and after the amendment thereon. The mainstream opinions in the academia hold that as the pretrial review system, the basic value of the pretrial meeting lies in that “filtering” case of public prosecution, dividing the complex and simple ones and safeguarding the human rights. Although Paragraph 2 of Article 182 in the amended criminal proceedings initially establish the pretrial meeting system for the criminal proceedings with Chinese characteristics and subsequently the Supreme People's Court and the Supreme People's Procuratorate also promulgate relevant judicial interpretations correspondingly, the provisions on the system still remain humble and lack the written rules with operability, which offers necessary room for this paper to research this system.Part Two researches the basic theory for pretrial meeting system. This part firstly clarifies the definition of the pretrial meeting, which refers to a preliminary criminal procedure where prior to the hearing, the court gathers the public prosecutor, the parties concerned, the defenders and agents AD litem to ask for information and hear opinions on relevant issues in trial so as to make preparations for hearing. This part then analyzes the functions of pretrial meeting, specifically including information gathering, dispute settlement and case division, next expounds the significance of the pretrial meeting system to criminal justice from the perspective of safeguarding judicial justice, improving the judicial efficiency and protecting the legitimate rights and interests of the parties concerned and finally briefly introduces the specific legal contents the pretrial meeting system to criminal proceedings from the perspective of application scope, initiating means, participating staff, meeting contents and legal effect, which offers theoretical preparations for the sequent empirical analysis.Part Three makes empirical analysis on the judicial practice of pretrial meeting. Through the review on the status quo of the implementation of pretrial meeting system in M city in S province, the author finds that the current implementation of pretrial meeting is confronted with six dilemmas, including the low application rate, narrow initiating scope, application scope broader than legal provisions, unfixed sponsor, divergent opinions of the judges on the legal effect of pretrial meeting and divergent handling methods for the exclusion of illegal evidence. Through deep analysis and research, the author proposes that the root for these problems lines in humble design and fuzzy position of the system, specific reasons for which include: first, the prosecution, defendant and judge have different understanding on the pretrial meeting; second, the monorail initiating mode ignores the litigation will of the prosecution and the defendant; third, there is no specific standard for application scope; fourth, the sponsors fail to make definite division; fifth, the result of pretrial meeting is “pending”; and sixth the provisions on exclusion of illegal evidence are fuzzy.Fourth Part proposes the countermeasures for the improvement of our pretrial meeting system. The author elaborates the basic thoughts for improving the pretrial meeting system for criminal proceedings, i.e., strictly following judicial rules, fully considering judicial background, and reasonably borrowing advanced experience. And then the author proposes seven specific suggestions for the improvement of our pretrial meeting system, including reasonable position of the system, scientific establishment of the initiating subject and participating staff, clarification of the rights and obligations of the participant, appropriate increase of the application scope of pretrial meeting system, strict restriction on meeting contents, clarification of legal effect of the meeting results and clear incorporation of the investigation and exclusion of illegal evidence and the denied contents into the meeting.Part Five is the conclusion, summarizing the research in this paper and makes elaborations on relevant issues.