China now wants to "cut" crimes that carry the death penalty
Beijing (AsiaNews / Agencies) - China wants to remove the death penalty for many crimes which still today carry it and abolish it outright for people over 70 years of age. The state newspaper China Daily said that a bill will be discussed by the Politburo Standing Committee by the end of August.
To date 68 crimes carry the death penalty, 44 of which are committed with violence, from murder to corruption to drug dealing and offenses against the state. Although there are no official figures, groups such as Amnesty International estimate that Beijing has the unenviable record of death sentences imposed and each year there are thousand death sentences carried out, amounting to well over half of those of all world executions: in 2008, 1718 of the global total 2390. This removal will be the first reduction of the sentence since 1979.
The death penalty has not proved an effective deterrent to such crimes as corruption, because it is rare for such crimes to result in execution. Just today Chen Shaoji, former head of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference for Guangdong, was sentenced to death for accepting bribes for about 30 million Yuan, but the sentence was suspended for two years, a formula that will see the sentence later commuted to life imprisonment after a period of good conduct. According to official figures, at least 10% of death sentences were commuted to life in prison.
Among the crimes for which capital punishment is to abolished, there is talk of corruption that involves contained amounts (no more than 100 thousand Yuan, 10 thousand Euros), although it is certain that the death penalty will remain for cases of serious corruption, a widespread phenomenon that has provoked social alarm.
It seems that the decision has also been taken to standardize the convictions of several courts, since, according to an expert study from the Jiatong University Shanghai, some courts hand down death sentences for corruption cases, while others impose life sentences. In January 2007 the Supreme People's Court, the central court of the country gave itself ultimate power to pronounce the death penalty. Following this, the Court also asked local judges to limit their use of the and administer a "justice tempered with mercy."
The notorious case of a death sentences imposed for the murder of a person who years later resurfaced alive and well, has led to widespread discussion. For this reason experts comment that the first problem is not so much the severity of the punishment, rather the rights of defence and the need to ensure an adequate and proper defence from the initial police investigations with less weight given to confessions, often obtained in unclear circumstances.
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