Money for Life: The Legal Debate in China About Criminal Reconciliation in Death Penalty Cases

Weatherley, Robert; Pittam, Helen

doi:10.1353/apr.2015.0004

Cited by 9 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 5 publications

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“…In practice, this opinion was translated into concrete moves for judges to avoid issuing decisions that might result in mass protest and petitions to higher authorities ( Minzner, 2011 ). The adoption of mediation has commonly been viewed by scholars as a move toward “restoring the age-old Confucian ethics of societal balance and harmony” in the legal system ( Weatherley & Pittam, 2015 , p. 279).…”

Section: Victim–offender Mediation In Chinamentioning

confidence: 99%

Gendered Justice in China: Victim–Offender Mediation as the “Different Voice” of Female Judges

Wei

2020

Int J Offender Ther Comp Criminol

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Attempts to uncover the “different voice” of female judges through testing the statistical significance of judges’ gender in decision making have offered inconsistent results. Meanwhile, a proliferation of research suggests that such “voice” might be detected through qualitative analysis. Existing findings indicate that when female judges have discretionary power regarding case management, they will typically foster a process of settlement. Based on this information, I conducted eight months of fieldwork in China and observed 68 victim–offender mediations in four district courts. I found that the criminal division is widely perceived as a masculine setting, and female judges are accustomed to employing mediation as a preferred dispute resolution method to facilitate reconciliation between the two parties and seek civil compensation for victims. Such judicial behavior is a result of propaganda from the Supreme People’s Court and a reflection of female judges’ life and work experience. By contrast, a neglect of mediation among male judges can be identified in the same workplace. The belief that mediation is feminine and time-consuming contributes to this neglect. In addition, rape lawsuits are an exception for mediation. This explorative research not only represents one of the first efforts to reveal a “different voice” in the Chinese criminal justice system but points out a direction of research for studying the judicial behaviors of female judges worldwide.

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Section: Victim–offender Mediation In Chinamentioning

confidence: 99%

Gendered Justice in China: Victim–Offender Mediation as the “Different Voice” of Female Judges

Wei

2020

Int J Offender Ther Comp Criminol

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“…'Reconciliation' involved a heavy emphasis on mediating an amount of compensation to be paid by the defendant, or the defendant's family, to the victim or the victim's family. In this way, the party hoped to avoid the endless citizen petitions complaining about the judicial system and its failure to deliver on the execution of judgements and compensation (Trevaskes 2015;Weatherly & Pittam 2015).…”

Section: Social Stability Maintenance and The 'Turn Against Law'mentioning

confidence: 99%

Justice in the PRC

Belkin¹

2017

Justice

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How the Chinese Communist Party Has Struggled with Managing Public Opinion and the Administration of Criminal Justice in the Internet Age ira belkin 'Nothing short of the death [of the defendant] will appease the public outrage'. 'Agreed. But just this once'. Ren Jianxin, then Secretary of the Central Political-Legal Commission, endorsing a subordinate's recommendation to approve the death sentence of a hit-and-run drunk driver in January 1998 (Chen 2013).

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“…96 Moreover, in 1998, Mary Carter Duncan opined that Saudi Arabia's diya practice was that jurisdiction's form of pardon. 97 As for Chinese VRAs, although their conceptual ancestry can be traced back to mediation in imperial times, 98 their State-supported incarnation in death penalty cases after 2007 arguably represents a means of 'taking clemency private'. Absent a constitutional executive clemency procedure to impart leniency on a case-by-case basis, Johnson and Miao find VRAs to be one of the five means of 'elite-led reconfiguration of Chinese capital punishment', alongside the legislature reducing capital offence numbers, replacing shooting with lethal injection as a method of execution, recentralizing judicial review in the SPC, and encouraging courts to issue 'suspended' death sentences.…”

Section: Victim-perpetrator Agreements As Functional Replacementsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…While VRAs in capital cases have not yet received legislative backing at the central government level, 101 supporters of VRAs since the mid-2000s have included individual judges of China's highest judicial organ, the SPC, 102 together with the Supreme People's Procuratorate. 103 Trevaskes has observed that:…”

Section: Victim-perpetrator Agreements As Functional Replacementsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…158 While nothing can bring back the life of the victim, financial compensation should only be part of a larger reconciliation agreement to 'compensate' for loss. Here, a package of restorative measures such as perpetrator apology and expression of remorse, face-to-face meetings with victims, agreeing to undertake rehabilitative activities in prison, and providing the victim's family with a direct means of expressing the pain that the death has caused 159 are all further means of healing, moving forward, and again, incentivizing murder victims' families to spare the perpetrator's life. Although such steps sometimes form part of Chinese VRA compacts, 160 they are usually lacking with the case of diya and sulh.…”

Section: Conclusion: Trans-systemic Recommendationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Victim–perpetrator Reconciliation Agreements:what Can Muslim-Majority Jurisdictions and the PRC Learn From Each Other?

Pascoe¹,

Miao

2017

ICLQ

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As States that use the death penalty liberally in a world that increasingly favours abolition, the Muslim-majority jurisdictions that are strict exponents of Islamic law and the People's Republic of China share a crucial commonality: their frequent use of victim–perpetrator reconciliation agreements to remove convicted murderers from the threat of execution. In both cases, rather than a prisoner's last chance at escaping execution being recourse to executive clemency, victim–perpetrator reconciliation agreements fulfil largely the same purpose, together with providing means of compensating victims for economic loss, and enabling the State concerned to reduce execution numbers without formally limiting the death penalty's scope in law. Utilizing the functionalist approach of comparative law methodology, this article compares the 13 death penalty retentionist nations that have incorporated Islamic law principles into their positive criminal law with the People's Republic of China, as to the functions underpinning victim–perpetrator reconciliation agreements in death penalty cases.

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Money for Life: The Legal Debate in China About Criminal Reconciliation in Death Penalty Cases

Cited by 9 publications

References 5 publications

Gendered Justice in China: Victim–Offender Mediation as the “Different Voice” of Female Judges

Gendered Justice in China: Victim–Offender Mediation as the “Different Voice” of Female Judges

Justice in the PRC

Victim–perpetrator Reconciliation Agreements:what Can Muslim-Majority Jurisdictions and the PRC Learn From Each Other?

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