From Time:
For those facing time on China’s death row, it must have come as a rare piece of good news: late last week, the Chinese government said it has reduced the number of prisoners it will execute this year. On Friday the China Daily, the country’s official English-language newspaper, published figures from two Beijing courts suggesting that in the first five months of 2007, the number of death sentences dropped 10% from last year. “In each case, whenever there is a doubt about whether execution is the appropriate penalty, we should always be ready to drop it,” the Supreme People’s Court Chief Justice Xiao Yang was quoted as saying.
In the past, human rights groups have criticized China for its notoriously poor treatment of prisoners and harsh sentencing policies, particularly for those convicted of political crimes. In January, however, new regulations were put in place mandating that the Supreme People’s Court, China’s highest bench, must review all death sentences. In March, China’s four major law enforcement agencies also called for more caution in handling death penalty cases and specifically discouraged torturing prisoners and coercing confessions. “The lower courts have to be more prudent now,” Ni Shouming, a spokesman for the Supreme People’s Court, said Friday. “If a case is sent back for a retrial by the highest court, it not only means the first judgment is wrong, but also a matter of shame for the lower court.” [Full Text]
