中國死刑犯一向超過全球總合（不敢相信吧？全球）在國際壓力下，中國決定所有死刑必須經由中央的高等法院做最後的通過，終於讓大幅減少死刑犯，約一成，一年中國大約有一萬至一萬五千人被判死刑。
Number of executions falling sharply in China
By Jim Yardley
Friday, June 8, 2007
BEIJING: China, which puts more inmates to death than the rest of the world combined, is reporting fewer executions this year after reinstating a requirement that every death sentence must be reviewed and approved by the country’s highest court.
Ni Shouming, a spokesman for the Supreme People’s Court, said lower courts across the country were reporting declining numbers of executions, though he did not provide any specifics. He told China Daily, the official English-language newspaper, that the national figures dovetailed with a recent survey of two lower courts in Beijing, which found a 10 percent drop in executions during the first five months of 2007.
Human rights experts have estimated that China executes 10,000 to 15,000 inmates a year. Beijing does not release official figures, which are designated state secrets. But China has been under increasing international and domestic pressure to improve its death penalty system. Cases of wrongful executions have sparked national outrage in recent years.
John Kamm, a human rights campaigner who has worked for years in China, said Chinese leaders also want to put a better face on the system as the 2008 Olympics draw nearer. He estimated that executions had dropped sharply - even by 40 percent - in the six years since Beijing was awarded the Olympics. He said two informed people in China had told him that approximately 7,500 people were executed in 2006.
"The Olympics is not the only reason," Kamm said Friday in an interview by telephone from Hong Kong. "When you execute somebody wrongly - and a lot of people have been executed wrongly - you are going to make a lot of people unhappy."
Kamm, director of the Duihua Foundation in San Francisco, which monitors cases of political prisoners in China, said he expected the number of executions to continue to decline now that the Supreme People’s Court had final authority. He said that lower courts would be forced to use greater discretion in applying the death penalty and also that the high court could return certain cases for retrial.
Ni, the high court spokesman, told China Daily that courts were already being more conservative in issuing death sentences. "The lower courts have to be more prudent now," Ni said. "If a case is sent back for a retrial by the highest court, it not only means the first judgment is wrong, but also a matter of shame for the lower court."
China remains committed to capital punishment. Last year, Prime Minister Wen Jiabao said the country had no plans to repeal the death penalty, noting widespread public approval in China for the use of capital punishment.
But the public also has increasingly demanded fairness from a judicial system in which less than 1 percent of all criminal defendants are acquitted.
Legal analysts in China note that the new authority assumed by the Supreme People’s Court is not actually new. Prior to 1981, death penalty cases were reviewed by the high court. But Deng Xiaoping, then paramount leader of China, became so concerned about a nationwide crime wave that appellate authority on death cases was shifted away from the high court and given to the provinces.
The result was a fast-track criminal justice system: a capital defendant was tried in a lower-level court; the appeal was handled by the province’s high court; and then that same high court handled the final review.
"The problem was that the high court was serving both as the appeals court and the final review of the case," said Keith Hand, a senior fellow with the China Law Center at Yale University. "The chance that a court would reverse itself was very small."
Xiao Yang, chief justice of the Supreme People’s Court, told state media this year that China "never again" would grant such power to provincial courts.
"A case involving a human life is a matter of vital importance," Xiao said.
The Supreme People’s Court regained its authority Jan. 1. Legal scholars in China have predicted that executions may fall by 20 percent or 30 percent once the change is fully absorbed by the criminal justice system.
Reformers, meanwhile, are focusing their attentions on trying to reduce the number of crimes punishable by death. China has more than 60 offenses eligible for a death sentence, ranging from murder to public corruption and a range of economic crimes.
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