Li Xunhu

　　Institute of Evidence Law and Forensic Science, China University of Political Science and Law

　　Abstract:The objective phenomenon of reliance on confessions is the source of many problems in the practice of criminal justice in China. Although successive amendments to the law have endeavored to improve the handling of confessions, they have been unable to resolve the dilemma of a rigid management mode, incompatible management strategies, and conflicting attitudes towards management. This paper has made a multi-dimensional reinterpretation of it from the judges’ perspective, including functional analysis, cultural interpretation and immediate considerations. It reveals that behind its functions of offering moral comfort or allowing evasion of responsibility, confession, as a medium of physical and intellectual management, has the more important function of supplementing and improving the legitimacy of criminal verdicts. The remolding of the legitimacy of criminal verdicts with the coordinated improvement of the management of confessions will change the mode of association between those who currently govern confession and those they govern and will clash with the current closed mode of criminal justice management, thereby promoting a transformation in the governance of criminal justice.

　　Keywords:reliance on confessions, confession governance, legitimacy of criminal verdicts, governance transformation