Autumn Assizes

Contrary to the distorted view of Chinese criminal justice that many Western observers advanced in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Qing dynasty inherited a sophisticated, multi-tiered procedure for the judicial and sentencing review of capital crimes that had deep roots in China's past.

The autumn assizes began in the provinces soon after an initial verdict was rendered. Provincial judicial commissioners compiled lists of recommended sentences that were forwarded to their respective provincial governors who considered the recommendations and submitted their own reports to the Board of Punishments in Beijing.

Homicide and Punishment in Eighteenth-Century China recommended sentences to a special tribunal known as the ‘Nine Dignitaries', which was usually comprised of forty to fifty officials drawn from the top ranks of the judicial administration. The Nine Dignitaries returned their decisions with comments to the Board of Punishments, which then presented its results to the emperor. A final grand ceremony in which the emperor personally checked off the names of the criminals who would be executed took place at dawn in the ninth month of the lunar year. By late imperial times, the institutionalisation of this annual multi-tiered procedure of sentencing review each autumn became the framework for imperial control of capital punishment and the public vehicle for demonstrat­ing imperial grace.

At the autumn assizes there were four possible outcomes: execution warranted, ‘indefinite stay', remaining at home to care for aged parents, and worthy of compassion. Few in number, those worthy of compassion were individuals who qualified for specific statutory pardons or reduced punishments as defined in the Qing Code. This included the aged, young and mentally impaired. In the same way, the legal qualifications to remain at home to care for aged parents, which were amended several times during the eighteenth century, granted mercy to a convict who was the sole support for parents or grandparents who were over age 70. The most numerous and more problematic outcome was indefinite stay. Throughout his sixty-year reign the Qianlong Emperor complained often about indefinite stays. Usually without the introduction of any new evidence, these cases were returned to the autumn assizes year after year for reconsideration with many hapless souls dying in local jails awaiting final sentence. By 1765 the Qianlong Emperor was angrily complaining that the autumn assizes was ‘awash' in unresolved sentences. Legislation that variously set time limits of three or five years on indefinite stays, after which convicts would be exiled to Xinjiang, was introduced and debated, but the costs of monitoring convicts whose sentences were commuted to exile and detaining those under provi­sional sentences of death placed an ever growing burden on local officials.

assizes. By the 1770s provincial officials were requesting clarifications on imperial orders to reclassify cases that had been found execution warranted but not yet ‘checked' for ten consecutive years to the category of indefinite stays. Suffice it to say that despite the increase in capital crimes there was a high degree of ambivalence regarding the use of capital punishment.

When the emperor did approve the death penalty, the sentence was carried out in the district where the crime had occurred. Historical statistics are sparse but data for nine years during the Qianlong reign, arguably a period of relative administrative competence, show that there was an average of 2,863 executions each year. Furthermore, the reluctance of many officials to finalise death sentences or reduce the sentence to exile during the annual autumn assizes meant that thousands of cases received deferred sentences. Imprisonment was never a statutory punishment in Qing law but, as the reports of deaths in detention reveal, a form of ‘lingering imprisonment', the indefinite detention in county or prefectural jails, became a de facto punishment for many who awaited final sentencing at the annual autumn assizes. By the late eighteenth century exile to Xinjiang had become an alternative punishment for individuals who had had their death sentences deferred multiple times. A study of exile to Xinjiang during the Qing notes that ‘from 1790 to 1792, some 8,000 criminals were placed in the execution deferred category three or more times' and ‘from late 1800 to the assizes of 1803, more than 10,000 were so classified and from 1809 to 1812, nearly 13,000 were so classified'.^[613] Still, thousands of these hapless souls languished in local jails for decades and hundreds never survived incarceration. Death in deten­tion was the tragic consequence of an overworked judicial bureaucracy, an under-resourced criminal justice system and an expanded use of capital punishment.