The Reasoning Of Criminal Verdict:1985-2015

Through an empirical study of the reasoning parts of 337 criminal judgments published in the Gazette of the Supreme People's Court since its initial publication in1985,this paper intends to sum up the changes and characteristics of the reasoning in our country's criminal judgments during the past over 30 years.Along the context of its evolution and from a perspective of regularity,we could find that there are many obvious problems in the reasoning of thecriminal judgments,mainly manifested as the mix of reasoning structure paradigms,improper discourse rhetoric,the lack of reasoning in reconstruction of facts,confusion in legal normative reasoning,shortage of explanation for the admissibility of the evidences and absence of reasoning in the measurement of penalty.From the viewpoints of sociology,economics and instrumentalism,the main causes are the alienation of the role of the judges and the narrow space for legal reasoning which impose restrictions on the judges' sufficient reasoning.Thus the cost and risk of sufficient reasoning much outweigh its expectable benefit,leading the criminal judges to avoid this kind of uneconomic practice in criminal trial.While the traditional reasoning model with feature of plane coupling,as well asthe judges' shortage in normative interpretation led to the failure of full reasoning in criminal judgements.To improve the quality of legal reasoning in criminal judgments,we could consider to normalize the expression and endow the reasoning with humanistic spirit.We could improve the reasoning model by means of optimizing the structural paradigm and adopting hierarchical analysis.At the same time,we could improve the reasoning methodology by introducing valuation in deductive reasoning and using of multiple interpretation method.Based on these efforts,we could lay a solid foundation for improving the quality of reasoning in criminal adjudicative documents.