Ancient China Death Punishment Essay

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HISTORICAL REVIEW OF ANCIENT CHINA’S DEATH PENALTY
The People’s Republic of China has a long history of punishing criminals by death penalty and those execution methods was very cruel. Generally, the physical penalty in ancient China can be summed up and called as “Five Punishment”. In different dynasty, the nature of the five punishment would be different. Under the five punishment, death penalty usually is the most severe penalty .
The death penalty can be carried out by two types of execution method in ancient china. The first type is homicide which the criminals would be killed by the executioner or other people e.g. death by hanging (絞刑), decapitation (斬首), ling chi (凌遲). The second type is forcing the criminals to commit suicide e.g. …show more content…

However, in some cases that the crime is too serious e.g. plotting rebellion, the execution area of death execution would be expanded. Not only the offender would be sentenced to death, the collective responsibility would cause the offender’s father and sons that aged above 16 were also put to death .
As time goes by, the Chinese society and its legal system have evolved to be more civilize and democratic. The cruel methods of the execution are no longer exists in modern China. The government want to use some more humane method to execute criminals and there are stricter and more accurate process to determine whether the sentence of death penalty is needed for the criminal.
DEATH PENALTY SYSTEM IN MODERN CHINA
Although the modern Chinese legal system has developed quite late compare to other countries in the world, the death penalty system included in the legal system has developed quite well. Due to respect of human rights, the Chinese government has been trying to eliminate several number of offences from the capital offenses lists. In addition, the government have also paid a lot of effort to design a more detailed legal procedure to prevent miscarriage of justice. Thus, there are few amendments made after the death penalty related law first enacted and took effect on 1979.

CAPITAL OFFENCES IN

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