Death Penalty in China after the Ninth Amendment: Legislatively Abolishing and Judicially Limiting

Abstract

This paper supplies some possible approaches to death penalty reform in China based on analyzing the reforms attempted by the Ninth Amendment. There now are 46 crimes punishable by death, and this penalty still plays a significant role in the criminal punishment structure. In order to abolish entirely the death penalty in Penal Code, the legislature of China should gradually abolish the death penalty for non-violent crimes and then for non-lethal violent crimes and finally for lethal violent crimes. In the case where the death penalty hasn’t yet been abolished completely, increasing the applicable conditions of suspension of execution of death penalty and reducing the scope of applicable objects (elderly defendants and other kinds of special objects) of the death penalty would be an effective road to controlling and limiting the use of the death penalty in judicial practice.