This Human Rights Journal entry is the first in a two-part series that explores the Supreme People’s Court’s recent disclosures of death penalty decisions made shortly after its human rights review in Geneva in January 2024. This post, Part I, looks at the demographics of those sentenced to death as well as trends in types of crime and decision review times. Part II explores reasons for disapprovals, the presence of counsel, and inconsistencies in the disclosures.  |
| The Sichuan High People’s Court upheld the judgments for a case of organized crime group and drug trafficking with 12 defendants in June 2022. Three principal defendants were sentenced to death. Image credit: Sichuan High People’s Court, CCTV13 |
Three years after a large number of judgments and judicial decisions involving the use of the death penalty were removed from China Judgements Online (CJO) in 2021, the Supreme People’s Court (SPC) added a new batch of death penalty review decisions in February 2024. The posting of these death penalty reviews occurred one month after China’s human rights record was reviewed by the United Nations Human Rights Council’s Universal Periodic Review (UPR) in January 2024.
CJO & Review Decisions
The posting of judgments and judicial decisions on CJO began in 2013. The effort to boost transparency was applauded by legal scholars and professionals inside and outside of the country. CJO judgments and decisions were not confined to ordinary civil and criminal cases, but also cases considered to be sensitive. Hundreds of endangering state security (ESS) cases and thousands of cult-related cases were made available on CJO.
Significant media attention from Western countries and NGOs like Dui Hua may have contributed to the Chinese government’s decision to purge documents related to ESS and cult cases in July 2021. Around the same time, CJO also removed SPC review decisions on the application of the death penalty.
Death penalty review decisions re-surfaced on CJO in 2022. In July 2022, Dui Hua found that decisions taken offline a year ago had been reuploaded to CJO. However, CJO did not post new information until the submission of China’s report at the country’s fourth UPR in January 2024. The new information came from a batch of 86 newly uploaded review decisions issued from 2022 to 2023 concerning 93 individuals. Dui Hua also found that decisions originally posted in July 2022 had been reposted, with CJO showing December 1, 2022 as the new posting date.
At the time of publication, CJO has not published any new death penalty reviews after March 2024. Also noteworthy is that seven months into 2024 no review decisions issued within the year 2024 have been published. This article reviews the batch of death penalty documents posted in February 2024. While the documents present some insights into an increasingly opaque system, there are omissions and inconsistencies that raise questions about the timing of the documents’ release.
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| Source: CJO |
China's trial system follows a two-hearing system in the trial process. The SPC’s decisions on the first- and second-hearing cases are final and must be enforced once promulgated. Cases that may result in a death penalty are first tried by an intermediate people’s court, and appellate trials are conducted by the relevant high people’s court. If the sentence is upheld, the judgment is submitted to the SPC for review. In death penalty cases, appeal is not an automatic process. In the batch of judgments examined in this post, all but one of the 93 convicted filed for appeal. All appeals were rejected by the high courts before they were submitted to the SPC for final review.
Demographics of Those Sentenced to Death
Individuals in death penalty cases are mostly male and of Han ethnicity (see below). Notably absent from the newly posted death penalty reviews are cases involving Uyghurs, who are often accused of terrorism and ESS crimes, both of which carry the maximum penalty of death.
Another group for whom no information was given is foreign nationals, despite such executions being reported during the period. For example, in 2023, the Chinese government executed a South Korean citizen who was convicted of drug trafficking.
Table 1. Sex of those sentenced
Table 2. Ethnicity of those sentenced
The majority of individuals sentenced to death are aged between 30 to 59.
Table 3. Age of those sentenced
While the Criminal Law stipulates lighter punishments for elderly offenders, two individuals over 70 years old were given death sentences. The SPC approved the sentence for a man from Changchun who committed robbery. That man was 69 years old at the time of the crime, and the SPC took 268 days to complete the review.
The SPC disapproved the death sentence for another man who murdered his neighbor on the grounds that the crime started as a civil dispute between two neighbors. Additionally, the offender surrendered to police. The case was sent back for retrial at the Jilin High People’s Court. The offender, an ethnic Mongolian, was 68 years old at the time of the crime. The SPC took 798 days to complete the review.
In all, the SPC approved 77 death sentences and disapproved 16 of them.
Crime
The death penalty in China is typically invoked when the offender commits a violent crime resulting in the death of the victim. In the new batch of decisions, murder accounted for more than half of those sentenced while robbery made up a fifth of the documents. Drug-related crimes—trafficking, selling, transporting, and manufacturing—accounted for another fifth of those sentenced.
When an individual was convicted of multiple crimes, the court typically applied the sentence of death to the crime considered to be the most severe. Life or fixed-term sentences were applied to the other crimes.
Dui Hua keeps track of the number of executions in China. The crimes committed in death penalty cases are similar to what we see in CJO. Of the 153 executions recorded by Dui Hua in 2023, 94 were of individuals convicted of murder, 13 of robbery, and 29 of drug crimes. In 2022, Dui Hua recorded 120 executions: 61 for murder, 11 for robbery, and 42 for drug crimes.
Review Time
Review time refers to the number of days between the final high court trial and the SPC review decision. In instances where no appeal is filed, the first-instance trial is considered the final trial.
In May 2020, Dui Hua examined a sample of 261 review decisions issued between 2015 and 2019 and made observations on the length of time between trial and the review decision. The SPC took an average of 190 days to issue a decision after the final trial by the court of second instance, with a median of 169 days. The longest review time was 573 days while the shortest was 20 days.
In the newly published death penalty reviews, the SPC took an average of 461 days to issue the decisions, with a median of 390 days. The lengthiest review concerns a drug manufacturing case with five offenders. All of them were first-time offenders who manufactured hundreds of kilos of methamphetamine. The first-instance trial was concluded in Changde, Hunan, on January 25, 2019. The high court upheld the sentences on December 27, 2019. All five had been convicted of manufacturing drugs and had been sentenced to death by the lower courts. The SPC completed its review 1,079 days (almost three years) on November 28, 2022. In its decision, the SPC approved the death sentences for three of them and disapproved the sentences for two. One of the disapproved sentences was revised to death with two-year reprieve and the other was revised to a life sentence.
The shortest SPC review took 93 days. The case involved drug trafficking, in which the convict was a recidivist who has been sentenced twice to short prison sentences for selling drugs. In his latest trial, Mr. Xiao was convicted of organizing and funding the trafficking of a large quantity of drugs obtained in Yunnan. He was sentenced to death by an intermediate court at the first-instance trial on February 15, 2022. The sentence was upheld by the high court on July 28, 2022. On October 29 of the same year, the SPC completed the review and approved the death sentence.
Table 5. Review time
Given the small (and selective) sample size, it is difficult to conclude with certainty that longer review times would necessarily result in disapproval. That said, the probability of disapproval rises when the Court takes longer to review. On the surface, the SPC appears to be more judicious. More reviews took a year or longer to complete compared to those completed within nine months.
