China to open more death penalty cases to public

By Lindsay Beck

BEIJING (Reuters) – China, which executes more people than
any other country, is to hold open trials for a large number of
death penalty appeals in an effort to better regulate
executions, a legal scholar said on Monday.

From the second half of 2006, all death penalty appeals
which go to a provincial high court will be heard publicly, a
departure from the usual practice of closed reviews and probes,
said Liu Renwen, a scholar at the Chinese Academy of Social
Sciences.

The number of executions in China is a state secret, but
Liu said he agreed with estimates in academic circles that the
figure was likely to be about 8,000 a year. Rights groups have
estimated the number at between 5,000 and 12,000.

With the judicial system under scrutiny after a series of
widely publicised wrongful convictions, the Supreme Court has
also moved to reclaim its right to final review of death
sentences, but Liu said the policy was meeting resistance from
lower courts.

“When the Supreme Court can take this power back is still a
question,” Liu told foreign correspondents.

“Local governments think it is a good tool to control
public security. If they lose such power they think of course
it would not be good,” he said.

The top court has set up three branch courts to conduct
reviews, a move officials say could cut executions by 30
percent.

But experts say it is still too short-staffed to handle all
death penalty cases and, with its bid to curb lower courts’
authority meeting opposition, Liu said making more death
penalty trials public was another way of controlling the legal
process for cases that could result in execution.

Several areas, including Beijing and Shanghai and the
southern province of Hainan, have already begun to hear appeals
in public trials, Xinhua news agency has reported.

The top court relinquished its review power during a
crime-fighting campaign in the 1980s. But lower courts, where
judges are sometimes not even law school graduates, have been
criticised for arbitrary sentencing.

Chinese were outraged by the case of a butcher executed for
murdering a waitress who was later found alive, and that of a
man who served 11 years for murdering his wife, who turned up
not only alive but with a new husband.

Both cases were widely reported and put criminal justice at
the top of the legal agenda.

But Liu said China’s annual session of parliament, which
opens on Sunday, was unlikely to make headway in legal reforms
or to enshrine the Supreme Court’s efforts to be the only court
to handle death penalty cases.

“There are a lot of issues that need to be resolved, but I
don’t think such technical issues can be debated in
parliament,” he said.

Some 68 crimes in China can incur the death penalty, about
half of which are non-violent offences, including corruption
and financial crimes, Liu said.

Executions in China are carried out by a bullet to the head
or by lethal injection.

(Additional reporting by Guo Shipeng)