China's Death Penalty Review Procedure: An Empirical Inquiry

• In Event: Capital Punishment and Its Diversion in Chinese and Global Perspective

Abstract

In 2007 China’s Supreme People’s Court centralized final review of all death sentences throughout the country at a single court in Beijing. The 2007 reform is widely credited with standardizing capital punishment oversight and improving procedural justice for condemned defendants. However, secrecy about capital punishment data in China has deterred researchers from subjecting the death penalty review process to empirical scrutiny. In this paper I turn to interviews as an alternative source of data on death penalty review. Drawing on dozens of interviews I conducted with capital defense attorneys and criminal justice practitioners in China in 2016 and 2017, I assess the impact of China’s death penalty review reforms a decade on.

Author

• Tobias Smith, University of California, Berkeley