Death Reviews by the Supreme People’s Court in China

• In Event: ACCCJ Studies in Criminology, Crime and Justice in China

Abstract

China has recently experienced a downward tendency in death executions. Does the Supreme People’s Court (SPC) play a role in decreasing capital punishment? This was and is the most interesting issue but yet unknown to criminologists, due in part to the secrecy of China’s death penalty. In this article, we introduce and analyze 500 death review cases collected from the official website of the SPC. To our surprise, we find that the SPC plays a very limited role in curbing death sentences. Although most crimes consisted of violent and drug offenses, less 3% of death sentences were rejected by the SPC’s final review procedure. As observed from the data, the absence of legal representation and judicial policy about execution in China are noticeable reasons for such a high approval rate. More findings and discussions are provided in this article. The authors invite criminologists to pay more attention to the SPC rather than courts at lower levels, and call for more efforts from the SPC to control the death penalty in China.

Authors

• Moulin Xiong, Southwestern University of Finance and Economics

• Siyu Liu, Pennsylvania State University

• Bin Liang, Oklahoma State University