Uniform exemptions introduced for criminal suspects
- By Zhang Yan
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E-mail China.org.cn, February 28, 2015
By the same token, suspects should be exempted from wearing shackles except if they are prone to violence. Even so, the court should make a basic judgment about whether the suspect is likely to flee from court, and the court officers can also take precautions to ensure such escapes never happen.
Zhang Liyong, president of the Henan Higher People's Court, once said: "The court should ensure that suspects on trial are shackle-free," adding that court orders should be necessary for exceptions or the "presumption of innocence" would be hypocritical.
Therefore, the Supreme Court's ban on having suspects wear uniforms is a good beginning, which, ideally, will lead to a nationwide ban on head shaving and shackles.
In addition, as many legal experts have pointed out, the current organization of criminal trials deprives suspects of their right to defense, apart from placing the defendant face to face with the judge, putting the former in an obviously inferior position.
Criminal suspects should be allowed to sit with their lawyers and face the prosecutor, rather than the judge, because, from the legal point of view, both the defendant and the victim enjoy equal status to provide a first-person account of the case to the court.
To sum up, increased respect to suspects will be shown in the improved details, and each such step represents concrete progress in China's rule of law.
The writer is a Shanghai-based commentator.
The article was translated by Chen Boyuan. Its unabridged version was published in Chinese.
Opinion articles reflect the views of their authors only, not necessarily those of China.org.cn.
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