excerpts:
The police and courts still rely mainly on pretrial confessions and perfunctory court proceedings to resolve criminal cases instead of the Western tradition of analyzing forensic evidence and determining guilt through contentious court trials.
China's criminal laws forbid torture and require judges to weigh evidence beyond a suspect's confession. But lawyers and legal scholars say forced confessions remain endemic in a judicial system that faces pressure to maintain "social stability" at all costs.
...
One obstacle is China's long history, in which criminal law was viewed as an extension of the power of the emperor rather than an objective code that applies to everyone. Confession amounted to a submission to authority, while a plea of innocence was viewed as a form of rebellion.
The legal code of the Tang Dynasty, for example, specified that guilt could only be finally assigned through confession, and that cases could not be officially recorded without a confession.
No comments:
Post a Comment