The Epistemological Interpretation And Theoretical Reconstruction Of Criminal Corroboration

In recent years,the research on criminal corroboration has gradually shifted to the philosophical interpretation of corroboration,especially from the perspective of epistemological philosophy to interpret the mechanism of corroboration.Scholars in the field of law have followed different approaches to the philosophical interpretation of corroboration.The first is the "theory of truth" based on the philosophy of epistemology.The second is the theory of justification based on the philosophy of epistemology.From the perspective of the consistency of interpretation,corroboration is attributed to the subtype of the best explanatory syllogism,or the justification theory of reliabilitism is used to explain the mechanism of corroboration.These scholars have made some contributions to the philosophical research of the criminal corroboration theory,but there are also some misunderstandings and limitations in the interpretation path.Corroboration,as a means of litigation cognition,should be explained based on the "justification theory" of epistemology,rather than be explained from the aspect of judging whether the conclusion is correct,that is,based on the "theory of truth".From the perspective of "theory of justification",corroboration is mainly manifested as a justification method of "coherentism",and in some cases,a certain "foundationalism"method of confirmation is also applied.The corroboration rules in judicial interpretation also show these two different factors of justification in different articles.Based on the explanation of "justification theory",criminal corroboration needs to solve the problem of two dimensions,one is the dimension of the means of justification,the other is the dimension of the standard of justification.In terms of means of justification,the foundationalism means of corroboration is to prove another doubtful evidence with the evidence of a certain authenticity.The corroboration method of coherence doctrine is to judge the authenticity of doubtful evidence by analyzing the coherence between doubtful evidence and the whole case evidence.In terms of the criterion of justification,the criterion of judging the mutual corroboration of evidence is not the same as the criterion of proof.The criterion of corroboration is already contained in the explaination of the mode of corroboration.The state of evidence corroboration depends on whether the evidence information can form the identity relation of coincident or the codirectional relation of coherent reasoning.The judgment of this state does not require a strict deduction process,but rather an empirical induction.Due to some misunderstandings of the internal logic of the justification,the corroboration rules in judicial interpretation reveal some defects in the justification of coherentism.The defects of corroboration rules are shown in the two aspects of "the discriminative setting of conditional relations" and "the logical misunderstanding of the comparison and justification of consistency".In terms of the setting of the conditional relationship,compared with the defendant's pretrial confession and the witness's pretrial testimony,the judicial interpretation sets more stringent conditions for the defendant's recantation in court and the witness's acceptance of contradictory pretrial testimony in court.In terms of the comparison and confirmation of consistency,it does not distinguish the elements between the contradictory and contradictory evidence integration systems,and sets "contradiction with the whole case evidence" as the negative condition for the defendant's reversion.In addition,the application of corroboration method in judicial practice is far beyond the scope of judicial interpretation,and it is confused with the boundary between the mutual corroboration state of evidence and the standard of proof.In practice,it is often believed that as long as the mutual corroboration of evidences can be formed,the standard of proof can be reached.For the existing problems of corroboration rules and corroboration methods,it is necessary to reconstruct the internal logic of corroboration rules and improve the corroboration methods.The logical reconstruction of the corroboration rules is mainly in the following three aspects:first,to clarify the attributes of the necessary conditions of the corroboration method;second,to realize the equivalence of the corroboration rules in the acceptance conditions;third,to make the necessary distinction between the evidence elements of the evidence coherent system of competition.In order to improve the corroboration method,it is necessary to change the use of corroboration method from "static corroboration" to "dynamic corroboration",and take the relative independence of evidence source as the precondition for the use of corroboration method.