“China's Police-Prosecutorial Dynamics in Pretrial Detention”

Liang Tang, Stanford Program in International Legal Studies Fellow, will discuss how China's constant campaigns against the detention crisis have all failed. The fundamental cause of the failure lies in the distorted police-prosecutorial relationship in practice, which differs significantly from the theory. The prosecutors are not able to entertain their legal authority to supervise police misconducts, due to the police predominance in the criminal justice regime. The police-prosecutorial dynamics in pretrial detention reflects more generally the cross-sectional competition of different interests in the system. These dynamics affect the political ecology of the criminal justice system and to some extent determine the fate of China's detention reforms.