| Based on data collected from China Law Year Book and practice in one district in east of China from 1997 to 2007, this paper conducts an empirical study on the operation of current Chinese Criminal Procedural Law. Although there are some variations, the data from the district demonstrates all the characteristics demonstrated by China Law Year Book, that is, very low rate of non-prosecution and non-guilty decision, low percentage of defendant appeal and high rate of affirmation of original judgment in second instance trial and trial supervision procedure, which strengthens the conclusion that Chinese criminal process is decided by criminal investigation.A process decided by investigation procedure means once a case is transferred by the investigative organ to be reviewed and prosecuted, it is very likely to be convicted. Most of the first instance trial just reviews and verifies the evidence collected in the investigation procedure. Such process is different from the “trial-center” criminal procedure of western countries. Such process has some advantages, such as encouraging investigative organs to find out the truth of the case by all means and to screen out most of the suspects in the early stage of criminal process to save procedural resources and make suspects get rid of criminal proceedings earlier. However, it does have some disadvantages. It makes investigative organs under great pressures to collect guilty evidence, which would infringe the human rights of the suspects. Moreover, it also makes the public trial a “rubber stamp” to the investigation procedure and cannot revise errors made in investigation.Current judicial reform chooses trail procedure as the breakthrough, and the investigation procedure seems quiet by comparison. This approach of reform is wrong. To be successful in criminal judicial reform, we must start from investigation procedure. The reform of investigation procedure is too ambitious a topic for this paper to look into. But the decision made by the investigative organ at the end of the investigation is the turning point of criminal proceeding. Establishing effective supervision of this turning point is the key to Chinese criminal process. |
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