An Analysis Of The "China’s Plea Bargaining System"

There are two main benefits of the establishment of China’s Plea Bargaining System.On the one hand,it would be helpful for courts to solving legal cases overstock problem,and improving judicial efficiency.On the other hand,defendants will end with a faster and a more lenient sentence.In 2015,the Supreme People’ Court has released the Fourth Five-year Reform of People’s Court which provided with a series of explicit requests about plea bargaining system functioning.In addition,courts have accumulated a wealth of experience in operating plea bargaining system through a trail of the minor criminal case plea bargaining program.Therefore,there is no doubt that a sophisticated plea bargaining system will emerge in the foreseeable future.The purpose of this paper is to identify some operational issues of China’s Plea Bargaining System,analysis these problems,and offer a number of practical solutions.With that in mind,this article will divide into three main sections,and all criminal cases in this paper are collected form a local people’court in Taiyuan City.Part Ⅰ:Evaluating the performance of China’s Plea Bargaining System which consists of five main indicators,including the proportion of suitable criminal cases,the degree of attorney involvement,the length of trial time,the mode of trial organization,and the measurement of commutation.Part Ⅱ:After analyzing the evaluation results of section one,survey data,and other references in section two,it indicates that current plea bargaining system has faced with couple challenges,such as,lack of systematic requests and explicit judicial interpretations,low applicable rate in criminal cases,exceeded duration of trial time,low attorney participation,and unstandardized commutation operations.Part Ⅲ:There are amount of alternatives which combined with foreign judicial experiences for these operational problems in section three.In my opinion,a comprehensive China’s Plea Bargaining System plays avital role in releasing local courts and procuratorates from overload criminal cases.Hopefully,this paper would contribute to the establishment of plea bargaining system and inspire other researchers.