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| Bindingness or Determinacy: Pre-determination Effect and Occurrence Mechanism of Sentencing Recommendations — An Empirical Examination Based on Drunk Driving Cases |
| Lin Xifen, Li Zheng |
| KoGuan School of Law, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai 200030, China |
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Abstract The Sentencing Recommendation System is at the core of the operation of the Plea Leniency System. The Criminal Procedure Law (2018) stipulates that for a case where the defendant admits guilt and accepts punishment, when the people’s court makes a judgment in accordance with the law, it should generally adopt the sentencing recommendations made by the people’s procuratorate. The Guiding Opinions issued in 2019 stipulate that in cases involving the admission of guilt and acceptance of punishment, procuratorates shall generally offer determinate sentencing recommendations. In practice, the phenomenon of the high adoption rate of sentencing recommendations has been widely mentioned, and it is generally believed in doctrine that the procuratorate is dominating the court’s sentencing decisions. For this reason, it is important to empirically test whether sentencing recommendations have a pre-determination effect on judges’ sentencing decisions, whether the phenomenon of prosecutorial justice exists in China, and if so, what is the mechanism. In this way, the current operational status of criminal justice and the relationship between prosecution and court in China can be diagnosed.Through normative analysis, this study summarizes the characteristics of sentencing recommendation system as bindingness and determinacy, and proposes two theoretical hypotheses: “pre-determination effect based on bindingness” and “pre-determination effect based on determinacy”. The two theoretical hypotheses were tested through 32,916 judgments of drunk driving cases as samples, using methods of event study, one-way ANOVA, propensity score matching, and Wilcoxon signed-rank test. The raw data confirmed the pre-determination effect of sentencing recommendations, and the mechanism of pre-determination effect of sentencing is analysed.The empirical study found that the pre-determination effect of the procuratorial organs’ sentencing recommendations exist objectively. However, in terms of mechanism, on the one hand, there is little correlation between the high rate of adoption of sentencing recommendations by courts and the bindingness of sentencing recommendations. Judges’ adoption of sentencing recommendations was extremely high both before and after 2018, and the high rate of adoption was not a product of the 2018 Criminal Procedure Law’s “generally should be adopted” provision. On the other hand, with controlling other confounding factors, there was a significant difference between the impact of generalized and range sentencing recommendations on judges’ sentencing decisions, as well as a significant difference between the impact of range and determinate sentencing recommendations on judges’ sentencing decisions. This suggests that the court’s sentencing decision is significantly influenced by the determinacy of the sentencing recommendation. The reason why the procuratorate could have a pre-determination effect on the judge’s sentencing decision through the determinacy of the sentencing recommendation may be due to the fact that the prosecution and the court organs have gradually reached a sentencing consensus on a certain type of case during the interaction in practice, and the sentencing recommendation of determinate sentence put forward by the procuratorate plays the role of the “anchoring effect”. Based on the sentencing consensus, the procuratorial organs have gradually compressed the sentencing decision space of judges by improving the determinacy of sentencing recommendations, which accelerates the formation of the Chinese “prosecutorial adjudication”.
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Received: 08 July 2024
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2026, Vol. 56 
