Last year, Chinese journalists uncovered the stories of several innocents who had received the death penalty.  China’s government is responding to the resulting attack on its death penalty policies by reinforcing existing laws and making the media and public a part of the process.

In fact, I believe that the second part, the involvement of the media and the public in death penalty cases, is the main method for enforcing the first part, reinforcing existing laws.  This is how China is letting the public be a capital punishment watchdog: “As of July 1, 2006, all the second-instance trials of death sentence cases shall be heard in open court,” as reported by the president of the Supreme People’s Court, Xiao Yang.  Instead of having the media uncover unjust executions after the trial, China is letting the media examine things as they happen.  This will put pressure on judges and lawyers to do a thorough job because, if they don’t, a reporter will certainly be glad to tell the world about it.

And the media will now be the ones to make sure a law is followed.  Previously, a lot of Chinese courts failed to hear the required second instance or repeal cases for the death penalty.  Instead, the convicted were killed straightaway.  Now the media will be watching death penalty convictions and making sure that the second instance trials happen.  If you’ve been reading my blog, you know that I’m a big fan of free press, and I think this is something of an admission by the Chinese government that, in some cases, the press can be a very effective watchdog.

But the death penalty will not be repealed in China in the near future.  Because the current mindset of the Chinese public is that "a killer should pay the victim with his life."  The Chinese also cite the fact that over half of the world’s nations still enforce the death penalty.  So the death penalty is still a moral debatably issue.  In a society with an eye for an eye sense of justice, the death penalty is expected.  In others, it is not.  I find it interesting, and refreshing, that the societies’ sense of justice determines much of the government’s sense of justice.