| dc.description.abstract | The general distrust of sentencing and Trial results in society has given rise to the research will of this paper to strengthen Taiwan′s sentencing model by learning from the sentencing system of death penalty cases in the United States. After conducting an empirical study of the U.S. Code and precedents, it is found that since the 1970s, the United States began to notice that there were arbitrary judgments in death penalty cases, and Georgia and other states in the country successively adopted a new two-level criminal procedure and sentencing judgment standard to pass the constitutional review. In addition to considering the mitigating factors of the defendant′s punishment, the contemporary death penalty case of Arizona in the United States also carefully considers whether there are reasons for aggravating circumstances, and will not use a single factor in favor of the defendant as a reason to avoid the death penalty. Besides, the assessment of the seriousness of the circumstances is not affected by the fact that the offense was committed with indirect intent. After collecting the reasons for the judgment of a total of 72 Supreme Court criminal precedents in Taiwan′s elective death penalty cases from 2003 to 2023, it was found that after 2003, Taiwan only selected the death penalty for criminal cases involving intentional homicide, and in 2009, the two Covenants came into force, and began to refer to Article 6 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights as the basis for sentencing. The 2018 UN Human Rights Council′s General Comment No. 36 on the Convention has led judicial practice to limit the application of the death penalty to direct intentional homicide. Since 2012, the Supreme Court′s criminal precedents have begun to systematically use Article 57 of the Criminal Law to analyze the circumstances of the defendant′s crime and the reasons for the defendant′s conduct as the Trial standards. The three main issues of contemporary death penalty cases, including ＂whether the circumstances of the crime are serious＂, ＂whether there is a possibility of indoctrination＂, ＂the determination of the best interests of the defendant′s children＂, etc.
After a comparative study with U.S. law, the following conclusions and suggestions for amending the law are drawn. First, in the United States legal system, first-degree homicide, which is punishable by death, includes indirect intentional homicide that was knowingly allowed to occur. Second, there is a risk that the possibility of indoctrination or the best interests of the accused′s children will be arbitrarily used as a factor in overturning the application of the death penalty alone. Third, the defendant′s mitigating circumstances can be measured in the same way as the U.S. pre-sentencing investigation report; The decision on whether to choose the death penalty should be weighed against aggravating and mitigating factors. Fourth, Taiwan′s judiciary should refer to the U.S. legal system to set up independent sentencing standards for death penalty cases, so as to improve the law. | en_US |