Asian Journal of Criminal Justice and Forensic Studies

The aim of this article was to conduct a comparative assessment of the impact of the use of death penalty in China and Iran on the legal system and social sphere. The study used a special legal method to analyse the normative consolidation of the death penalty, a comparative legal analysis to compare the institutional models of China and Iran, and a case study method to identify social selectivity and its impact on public perception of criminal justice. It has been established that in China, the death penalty was legally enshrined as a type of criminal punishment and was applied exclusively for “extremely serious crimes,” the list of which was specified in the Special Part, in particular, intentional crimes against life, crimes against state security, generally dangerous acts, and certain corruption crimes on an especially large scale. It has been found that the Chinese model was specific in that it has two forms of death penalty (immediate execution and a two-year reprieve), as well as mandatory centralised review of all death sentences by the Supreme People’s Court of the People’s Republic of China, which limits the discretion of lower courts. It has been established that in Iran, the criterion of the seriousness of the crime was not formulated through a single category, but was determined by the offence's classification under the qisas, hadd or tazir regimes, which results in different legal grounds and mechanisms for the implementation of the death penalty. An analysis of judicial review materials for 2022-2023 showed a systematic change of death sentences to death with a two-year reprieve or life imprisonment, which indicates the real impact of centralised control on the restriction of judicial discretion. In Iran, on the contrary, a decentralised and regime-fragmented institutional model has been identified, in which final decisions on the execution of the death penalty were made by different courts depending on the regime of responsibility (qisas, hadd, tazir) without a single national review mechanism. It has been found that the centralised review of death sentences in China increases the legitimacy of justice, but does not eliminate the social selectivity of the application of this sanction. It was concluded that in both states, the death penalty was being transformed from an instrument of justice to a mechanism of social control. The results obtained can be used to develop more transparent standards of judicial control and to formulate criminal policy aimed at reducing social selectivity

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