Capital Punishment in The People's Republic of China - Legal Procedure

Legal Procedure

After a first trial conducted by an Intermediate people's court concludes with a death sentence, a double appeals process must follow. The first appeal is conducted by a High people's court if the condemned appealed to it, and since 2007, another appeal is conducted automatically (even if the condemned opposed to the first appeal) by the Supreme People's Court of the People's Republic of China (SPC) in Beijing. The execution is carried out shortly thereafter and is fairly automated. As a result of its reforms, China says, the Supreme People's Court overturned about 15 percent of the death sentences handed down by high courts in the first half of 2008. In a brief report in May, Xinhua quoted anonymous sources as saying Chinese courts handed down 30 percent fewer death sentences in 2007 compared with 2006.

Chinese courts hand down the sentence of "death sentence with two years' probation" (Chinese: 死缓; pinyin: sǐ huǎn) as frequently as, or more often than, they do actual death sentences. This unique sentence is used to emphasize the seriousness of the crime and the mercy of the court, and has a centuries-old history in Chinese jurisprudence. It almost always reduced to life or 10-15 years imprisonment if no new crime is intentionally committed during the two year probationary period.

Article 49 in the Chinese criminal code explicitly forbids the death penalty for offenders who are under the age of 18 at the time of the crime. The SPC also issued a policy in 2007 which required lower courts to arrange for the visitation of condemned criminals by relatives; forbade the practice by local authorities of parading prisoners on death row; and required that executions be publicly announced.

However, capital punishment in China can be politically or socially influenced. In 2003, a local court sentenced the leader of a triad organization to a death sentence with two years of probation. However, the public opinion was that the sentence was too light. Under public pressure, the supreme court of China took the case and retried the leader, resulting in a death sentence which was carried out immediately.

Since 1980, the state's security apparatus has initiated various "strike hard" (Chinese: 严打; pinyin: Yándǎ) campaigns against specific types of crime. Critics have noted that the campaigns lead to the streamlining of capital cases, where cases are investigated, appeals heard, and sentences carried out at rates much more rapidly than normal. Since 2006, Chinese Supreme Court justice Xiao Yang has worked to blunt the "strike hard" policy with his own policy of "balancing leniency and severity" (Chinese: 宽严相济; pinyin: Kuānyán Xiāngjì), which is supposedly influenced by Hu Jintao's Harmonious society concept. Xiao's policy includes improving the quality of appeals by mandating that the SPC, rather than simply the high people's court, review capital crime cases; increasing use of the "death sentence with two years' probation"; and requiring "clear facts" and "abundant evidence" for capital cases.

The abolition of the death penalty in Hong Kong since 1993 is a major reason why mainland China does not have a rendition agreement with that city.