The Cause And Prevention Of Criminal Misjudged Cases From The Evidence Perspective

Criminal misjudged cases have always played a disgraceful role in criminal justice at all times and in all over the world, which obstruct the judicial justice, damage the judicial authority and influence the social stability. In recent years, with the media exposure of series criminal misjudged cases, all sectors of society turned to deplore and condemn these criminal misjudged cases. The well-known She Xianglin case, Zhao Zuohai case and Du Peiwu case have all set off a public opinion frenzy. The crusade of public opinion against criminal misjudged cases forced us to rethink our criminal justice system. How to prevent criminal misjudged cases has become a difficult problem in front of legal workers. This article studies the causes of criminal misjudged cases and its corresponding precautions from the evidence perspective.This article is divided into three parts:the first part concludes a definition of criminal misjudged cases on the base of analysis of injustice case, fake case, misjudged case and chinese-style misjudged cases, combining with bourdieu’s theory of field through the comparison and analysis of several domestic concepts of criminal misjudged cases, as well as study of international concepts of criminal misjudged cases; the second part analyses the causes of criminal misjudged cases based on seventy collected cases, then divide them into three points, the first is the weakness of evidence consciousness of judicial officers, including the investigators’bad habits of settling lawsuits subjectively, paying too much attention to the confession and judging cases based on isolated evidence in the process of investigation, the second is judicial proof violate the legal procedures, including the illegal evidence collection procedure (extorting confessions by torture, fabricating fake evidence, wrongful judicial appraisal, wrongful crime scene investigation, wrongful identification, ignoring evidence of innocence, improper storage of evidence), the formal cross-examination procedure and the unscientific attestation, the third is the lagging legislation of evidence system, including the lack of evidence rule, the limited right of investigating and collecting evidence of lawyer, the absent principle of reversion of burden of proof in extorting confessions by torture, the absence of right of silence and prohibition of forced self-incrimination, and the imperfect system of present of witnesses; the third part discusses the precautions of criminal misjudged cases respectively from strengthening the evidence consciousness of judicial officers, correcting violations in judicial proof (correcting the illegal evidence collection procedure, reform the cross-examination procedure and attest scientifically) and improving the legislation of evidence system (improving the rules of evidence, strengthening the lawyers’rights of investigating and collecting evidence, constructing the principle of reversion of burden of proof in extorting confessions by torture, implementing the principle of prohibition of forced self-incrimination and establishing the right of silence, and improving the system of present of witnesses) according to the above analysis of causes of criminal misjudged cases.