From People’s Daily Online (link)
To promote meticulosity in meting out capital punishment, top judge Xiao Yang said Saturday that Chinese courts will start from this year to open court sessions when hearing death sentence trials in second instance, after taking steps to retrieve the power of death penalty review from provincial courts.
“As of July 1, 2006, all the second-instance trials of death sentence cases shall be heard in open court,” Xiao, who is also president of the Supreme People’s Court (SPC) said in his report on the work of the court.
This represents another step taken by the SPC to reform the court system concerning capital punishment, after it announced to retrieve the power of death penalty approval from provincial higher people’s courts in October 2005.
