Tang Zhongzan: Compromise our sense of justice to strive for the light of truth. The three stages of China's criminal defense: recovery and reconstruction, reform and development, high-level multi-domain services. Seven aspects of legal system construction impact:
1. Criminal defense is a constitutional principle. The 1954 Constitution stipulates that the defendant has the right to obtain a criminal defense. Do not forget, the Constitution establishes the status of criminal defense with legal guarantees.
2. Political system construction. The criminal justice system is a reflection of the political system; it cannot rely entirely on suppression. Legal services are the lubricant of the state machinery. Stalin once said that history is merely a shadow on the chain of state machinery.
3. Involves democratic politics. Before China had criminal procedure laws, prosecution, defense, and adjudication were all part of one service. Now there are lawyers in court who can use national laws to defend their clients, which is an embodiment of democracy.
4. Involves economic development and national stability and harmony. Lawyers defending cases like economic fraud contribute to the country’s superstructure.
5. National external image. If there were no criminal defense system in law, other countries would question whether our great nation is a democratic and rule-of-law country.
6. Human rights protection. Lawyers meeting suspects during the investigation phase safeguards their human rights. When suspects are subjected to torture, they can receive legal protection from lawyers. After establishing the criminal defense system, more contributions have been made to human rights protection.
7. The criminal defense system drives the construction of legal systems in other areas, moving from the criminal defense system into other fields.
Suggestions for other lawyers:
1. Chinese politics serves China. Without understanding Chinese politics, one cannot understand Chinese law.
2. Chinese characteristics. Pay attention to China's characteristics when conducting criminal defense work, changing the environment from man-rule to rule of law.
3. Use soft power to overcome difficulties.
4. Know how to protect yourself. Build three lines of defense in our minds to prevent corrosion and erosion. Our clients may be our biggest enemies.
5. Improve your own product quality. Only by refining our defense arguments into high-quality works can we minimize the risks faced by lawyers.
Comments by Liu Dangjun:
1. Promoting role. When ordinary people encounter legal matters, they first think of lawyers.
2. The status of lawyers has improved. My view: The influence of criminal defense lawyers needs further development. Currently, the situation of China's criminal defense lawyer team is roughly as follows: There are about 10,000 lawyers nationwide, but only a few thousand specialize in criminal defense, even up to ten thousand, making them a weak force. First, we must achieve universality before we can achieve effectiveness. Additionally, our law firm has 40 full-time lawyers, but only four or five focus on criminal defense. Personally, criminal defense business is my secondary profession. To solve the issue of influence, quantity must come first, and we should not overemphasize quality alone.
Factors constraining the influence of criminal defense lawyers:
1. Legislative issues. The legislative perspective hasn't properly addressed relationships, artificially creating difficulties, mainly the "three difficulties" problem. For example, in Inner Mongolia, according to my understanding, lawyers have not enjoyed the rights granted by the new Lawyers Law, and mainly rely on personal connections to solve these problems.
2. The legal professional community does not show sufficient respect for lawyers.
Suggestions for colleagues:
1. From the perspective of serving our system, we should not make other members of the legal community feel that we are causing trouble or adding chaos.
2. As a lawyer, especially a criminal defense lawyer, we must maintain our integrity. Here, "calcium deficiency" refers to inappropriate verbal expression. We need to pay attention to our words and do our utmost to safeguard the interests of our clients.
3. Lawyers also need to talk about politics and understand politics, participating in government affairs as much as possible to increase our discourse power.
Hu Weihao: A lawyer's mission is arduous, bright, and honorable.
Qian Lieyang: Personal views:
1. Lawyers must understand politics and talk about politics, just as Lawyer Liu mentioned, we must not lack calcium. This is the state that criminal defense lawyers should possess.
2. Defense is not for the bad behavior of a person, but for the rights granted to this person by the constitution.
3. The criminal defense system has reached a bottleneck today. Quantity leads to quality, but without quality, it affects quantity. In practice, judicial structure, litigation structure, inequality between prosecution and defense, human nature issues, and the legal system will all affect the quality and quantity of criminal defense. The exact status of lawyers within the judicial institution is worth discussing.
Zhang Wen Hao: I quote Professor Jiang Ping's words to summarize my point of view: A nation that does not know how to summarize its own experiences and lessons cannot be called a rigorous nation. Still, Professor Jiang Ping's words, all we can currently do is shout out.
Website of Beijing Shangquan Law Firm: http://www.sqxb.com/