Death Sentences In The Great Qing, 1744-1840: Critical Note On Civilization In Comparison With England And Wales

Over the last centuries, the view on the death penalty in Qing China has been distorted, presenting a picture of abusive brutality and excessive cruelty, and thus was used as the critical pretext to establish immune extraterritorial jurisdictions. Nevertheless, the existing comments are more literary embellishments without empirical evidence, and few comparative and historical perspectives have been utilized to clarify the truth. In this study, we mined annual death sentence numerical data for the period 1744 to 1840 from official archives and literatures, deciphering the capital crimes in detail and ascertaining the longitudinal trend with population statistics. To reassess the profile of capital law and justice, we carefully reviewed the previous literatures and conducted a comparative analysis of key aspects in Qing China and in England and Wales. Using multiple analytical strategies, the study revealed the following in Qing China: (a) about 20% of death sentence cases resulted in execution and 80% in suspended or nominal sentences; (b) on average, 3183.78 cases were death sentences in a country with a population of about 400 million; (c) the death sentence rate steadily decreased from 1.20 to 0.73 per 100,000 population; and (d) the majority of capital crimes concerned homicides and killings in fights, while only about 10% involved robbery. During the same period, England and Wales were bloody codeless countries with death sentence and execution rates that were at least three to nine times higher than in Qing China, and capital crimes mainly involved property crimes. This study’s conclusion, therefore, is that Qing China was very lenient in terms of codification and capital justice in comparison with England and Wales. Flowing with “anti anti-orientalism”, we argue that the erroneous picture should be discarded and appeal for historical China’s contribution to the heritage of global law and justice to be recognized

Design concepts for the Cherenkov Telescope Array CTA: an advanced facility for ground-based high-energy gamma-ray astronomy

Ground-based gamma-ray astronomy has had a major breakthrough with the impressive results obtained using systems of imaging atmospheric Cherenkov telescopes. Ground-based gamma-ray astronomy has a huge potential in astrophysics, particle physics and cosmology. CTA is an international initiative to build the next generation instrument, with a factor of 5-10 improvement in sensitivity in the 100 GeV-10 TeV range and the extension to energies well below 100 GeV and above 100 TeV. CTA will consist of two arrays (one in the north, one in the south) for full sky coverage and will be operated as open observatory. The design of CTA is based on currently available technology. This document reports on the status and presents the major design concepts of CTA

Multi-messenger observations of a binary neutron star merger

On 2017 August 17 a binary neutron star coalescence candidate (later designated GW170817) with merger time 12:41:04 UTC was observed through gravitational waves by the Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo detectors. The Fermi Gamma-ray Burst Monitor independently detected a gamma-ray burst (GRB 170817A) with a time delay of ~1.7 s with respect to the merger time. From the gravitational-wave signal, the source was initially localized to a sky region of 31 deg2 at a luminosity distance of 40+8-8 Mpc and with component masses consistent with neutron stars. The component masses were later measured to be in the range 0.86 to 2.26 Mo. An extensive observing campaign was launched across the electromagnetic spectrum leading to the discovery of a bright optical transient (SSS17a, now with the IAU identification of AT 2017gfo) in NGC 4993 (at ~40 Mpc) less than 11 hours after the merger by the One- Meter, Two Hemisphere (1M2H) team using the 1 m Swope Telescope. The optical transient was independently detected by multiple teams within an hour. Subsequent observations targeted the object and its environment. Early ultraviolet observations revealed a blue transient that faded within 48 hours. Optical and infrared observations showed a redward evolution over ~10 days. Following early non-detections, X-ray and radio emission were discovered at the transient’s position ~9 and ~16 days, respectively, after the merger. Both the X-ray and radio emission likely arise from a physical process that is distinct from the one that generates the UV/optical/near-infrared emission. No ultra-high-energy gamma-rays and no neutrino candidates consistent with the source were found in follow-up searches. These observations support the hypothesis that GW170817 was produced by the merger of two neutron stars in NGC4993 followed by a short gamma-ray burst (GRB 170817A) and a kilonova/macronova powered by the radioactive decay of r-process nuclei synthesized in the ejecta

Death Sentences In The Great Qing, 1744-1840: Critical Note On Civilization In Comparison With England And Wales

Over the last centuries, the view on the death penalty in Qing China has been distorted, presenting a picture of abusive brutality and excessive cruelty, and thus was used as the critical pretext to establish immune extraterritorial jurisdictions. Nevertheless, the existing comments are more literary embellishments without empirical evidence, and few comparative and historical perspectives have been utilized to clarify the truth. In this study, we mined annual death sentence numerical data for the period 1744 to 1840 from official archives and literatures, deciphering the capital crimes in detail and ascertaining the longitudinal trend with population statistics. To reassess the profile of capital law and justice, we carefully reviewed the previous literatures and conducted a comparative analysis of key aspects in Qing China and in England and Wales. Using multiple analytical strategies, the study revealed the following in Qing China: (a) about 20% of death sentence cases resulted in execution and 80% in suspended or nominal sentences; (b) on average, 3183.78 cases were death sentences in a country with a population of about 400 million; (c) the death sentence rate steadily decreased from 1.20 to 0.73 per 100,000 population; and (d) the majority of capital crimes concerned homicides and killings in fights, while only about 10% involved robbery. During the same period, England and Wales were bloody codeless countries with death sentence and execution rates that were at least three to nine times higher than in Qing China, and capital crimes mainly involved property crimes. This study’s conclusion, therefore, is that Qing China was very lenient in terms of codification and capital justice in comparison with England and Wales. Flowing with “anti anti-orientalism”, we argue that the erroneous picture should be discarded and appeal for historical China’s contribution to the heritage of global law and justice to be recognized

Miscarriages of Justice in Chinese Capital Cases

In recent years, the media exposure and judicial exoneration of wrongfully convicted defendants in a number of high-profile capital cases in China have attracted the attention of reformers, the general public, and policy makers—both domestic and international. Yet, until now, there has been merely a thin body of empirical literature on this salient research topic. This lack of academic attention is due to the political sensitivity of the topic and the lack of publicly-accessible data. This paper is aimed at filling this critical gap in the literature. Based on in-depth analysis of 122 deathsentenced innocents, of which 109 have been exonerated and five have been wrongly executed, the research findings reveal that: first, murder and robbery account for the majority of convictions; second, over half of those wrongfully convicted were sentenced to the death penalty with immediate execution; (c) third, innocent prisoners facing capital proceedings, on average, were incarcerated 3161.3 days as a result of recursive trials; (d) courts are reluctant to exonerate the innocents, only 4.1% of cases were acquitted in the second instance while 93.44% of those cases were sent to the first instance for retrial, or upheld and sentence reduction at the second instance; (e) there has been a significant reduction in death penalty with immediate execution and increasing in exoneration since 2007. The paper demonstrates that ‘hard strike’ campaigns and provincial higher courts’ review of capital cases bred lethal errors, but China has made great progress in the prevention and correction of wrongful death sentences

Analysis of performance criteria for ultrafiltration membrane integrity test using magnetic nanoparticles

International audienceAn alternative ultrafiltration membrane integrity test utilizing magnetic nanoparticle as a surrogate has been investigated in previous studies, but the absence of a feasible estimation model for the degree of membrane damage causes that this simple membrane integrity test would be not applied easily. This study proposed a calculating model to predict membrane defect size, and investigated the theoretic resolution of the integrity test method. The results obtained with the evolved prediction model D, which is based on Darcy’s law and Bernoulli equation, were satisfactory in predicting the membrane defect size. In this study, this integrity test method had about 39.33% probability to have a theoretic resolution of 3 μm or less under common experimental conditions