With Chinese courts revising more than 1,300 criminal
decisions in 2014, the chief justice of the Supreme People’s Court, Zhou Qiang,
told the national legislature in March 2015, “With regard to wrongful
convictions, we feel a deep sense of self-blame and demand that courts at all
levels draw a profound lesson.”[1]
Six months earlier, President Xi Jinping had initiated legal reforms on the
premise that the Communist Party needed a “better-functioning” legal system in
order to be able to govern.[2]
The question is whether this push will come to anything substantial.
According to The Wall
Street Journal, political considerations are one reason why the courts have
had so many wrongful convictions, including in capital crimes. “The police,
prosecutors and the courts are often coordinated by the party based on
interests other than determining the truth,” Joshua Rosenzweig, a human-rights
researcher, explains.[3]
This collusion is vulnerable to the human presumption of infallibility. The
police or government officials presume that “they have their man,” and the
prosecutors and even judges act as reinforcers (or enforcers). As a result, the
defense attorneys can only put up defenses they know will not make any
difference to the outcome of the cases.
In Western jurisprudence, the conventional wisdom is that
only a judiciary independent from the government and police can resist “political
considerations” and intimidation. Even when formally separate, a judiciary can
still be subject to pressure, however. Chinese firewalls can fail when a
power-gradient is sufficiently steep. A judge facing re-election, for example,
may not want to “rock the boat” with “the powers that be” years before the
election, lest other candidates be used to take the judge out.
Unfortunately for the Chinese people, President Xi continued
the requirement that the legal system serve the interests of the Communist
Party.[4]
So for all the atoning for miscarriages of justice, the government’s efforts to
reform the legal system in order to instill public confidence in it and thus in
the party as well, the collusion—and thus the wrongful convictions—would likely
continue. Put another way, without fundamentally altering the design of the
system that includes the government, the Communist Party, the police, lawyers,
and the courts, urging judges to be more careful can only be a fool’s errand.
[1] Josh
Chin, “Top Judge Apologizes for Wrongful Convictions,” The Wall Street Journal, March 13, 2015.
[2]
Ibid.
[3]
Ibid.
[4]
Ibid.
