CHINA: Death penalty still favoured by Chinese - Most mainlanders still believe in taking a life for a life, though the government has moved towards more humane methods

 China retains the death penalty because the public still supports the ultimate punishment, but Beijing has taken steps to restrict its use and turn to more humane ways of executing criminals, said a Beijing-based academic.

 Law professor He Jiahong of the People's University, who spoke at a salon organised by City University two days ago, said: 'The traditional thinking among Chinese people is that the death penalty is justifiable so long as the executed is the right guy, the real criminal.'

 He said that the majority of people believed in a life for a life in that a murderer should pay with his life for his crime, and cited a survey conducted in 1995 by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. Of 5,000 respondents, more than 95 % supported the death penalty.

 He related the case of a woman who had committed suicide in a police cell. She and her boyfriend, who had been quarrelling in a park in Dongdan in Beijing late one night, were taken to a police station by patrol officers.

 Unable to calm the angry young woman down, the officers placed the two in separate cells for the night. The next morning, the woman was found seriously ill after taking rat poison left in the cell. She later died.

 Some police officers were disciplined, but the deceased's mother insisted that at least one policeman be executed.

 In a headline-grabbing case, in which a man abducted, raped and murdered a schoolgirl, some Beijing residents said it was not sufficient for the murderer to be executed with a bullet. They called for more severe punishment.

 Prof He said that education to get people to accept abolition would take time. 'It cannot take place overnight. The people will not agree to abolition.' This was despite the fact that experience in other countries showed that the death penalty itself had no impact on the crime rate.

 Several conference participants gave examples of the US, which reinstated capital punishment in the 1970s, and of Canada and France, which abolished the death penalty in 1976 and 1981 respectively. Studies showed that the changes did not affect the crime rate.

 Asked about the deterrent effect of the death sentence in China, Prof He said: 'We don't have the statistics for that. Some officials of the Ministry of Public Security said that when capital punishment for general theft was abolished, they saw more theft cases.'

 He added that the link was inconclusive because the change to the law in 1997 coincided with ongoing reforms in the country. Other conditions prevailed such as mass retrenchment of workers and a widening income gap.

 'In China, we have a serious crime situation now because of a changing society. At this stage of development, we probably still need capital punishment.'

 Deterrence, Prof He said, rested on high rates of arrest and conviction rather than the severity of punishment. People would tend to commit a crime if they saw little chance of their being detained and convicted, he said.

 He said 20 to 30 % of criminal cases committed in China were solved by the police, the rate being higher for serious crimes such as murder. As to why capital cases in the West dragged on for years while trials were speedy on the mainland, he said: 'In China, judges review the evidence before the trial. They ask questions of the prosecutors and investigators before the trial.'

 As society progressed, the government too has turned to more humane execution methods, he noted, adding that the Chinese government had abolished brutal execution methods such as beheading and hanging.

 Death by injection is now promoted as a execution method over shooting, with the 1st execution by injection carried out in 1997.

 Organisations such as Amnesty International have estimated more than 2,000 executions in China each year.