Analysis On The Case Of Offence Of Environmental Pollution Of Wang Juming And Lu Xiaodi

In the case of Wang Huming and Lu Xiaodi’s offence of environmental pollution,the court finally determined that the behavior of the two defendants constituted offence of environmental pollution,and gave light punishment to the two defendants after comprehensively considering their criminal facts,criminal circumstances and manifestation of repentance.There are three main questions in this case: first,whether the garbage in this case belongs to other harmful substances stipulated in the offence of environmental pollution;The second question is whether the case conforms to the first specific situation of serious environmental pollution in judicial interpretation;The third question is how to determine the amount of loss of public and private property caused by the defendant.For the first question,there are no specific provisions on the identification standard of "other harmful substances" in offence of environmental pollution in China at this stage,which needs to be comprehensively analyzed and judged in combination with the defendant’s various factors.Judicial practice shows that it needs to be judged in combination with the identification results of specialized agencies and whether the pollution behavior meets the criminal standards when determining whether the pollutant in specific cases belongs to other harmful substances.In some cases,the pollutants involved are not hazardous waste,but secondary pollutants are generated at the stacking site,There is no legal provision on whether the nature of the initial pollutants can be determined according to the toxicity of the secondary pollutants.In other cases,the pollutants did not reach the harmful degree of first three categories of hazardous substances specified in the legal provisions of offense of environmental pollution,but they were also interpreted as "other hazardous substances" because the place where they dispose of garbage was illegal or they caused serious environmental pollution.For the second question,how to identify specific circumstances of seriously polluting the environment,judicial interpretation provides multiple incriminating situations,but for the understanding of the explanation,there are still different views,many scholars interpret the specific terms of judicial interpretation from legal interests protection and criminal form and other perspectives,the criminal law’s provisions on the crime are ambiguous,determining the crime relies on judicial interpretation too much in practice,which does not conform to the principle of statutory crime and punishment to a certain extent,and it is easy to lead to the phenomenon of different sentences for the similar cases in environmental pollution criminal cases.The author thinks that we should clarify the specific situation of "seriously polluting the environment" from the legislative level,so as to identify the crime better in judicial practice.On the third question,for the crime of environmental pollution,the law stipulates that both causing the loss of public and private property and causing the damage to the ecological environment reach a certain standard constitute a crime,but in practice,ascertaining crime mainly refer to the loss of public and private property,while judicial interpretation and relevant documents just simply distinguish the loss of public and private property from the damage to the ecological environment without further elaboration,as a result,the both sides are often confused in judicial trials.