Feature: A Chinese judge's life-or-death struggle

Lu Jianping lives with a constant "torture of the soul".

As a law professor at Beijing Normal University, he believes the death penalty should be abolished. But as a death penalty case reviewer of the Supreme People's Court, he must often sign "Approved" - leading to someone's execution.

In 1979, then 16-year-old Lu went to Beijing's Renmin University from hometown Zhejiang Province. He majored in law, but never dreamed of working in a core position in China's judicial system.

As an intern at the procuratorate before graduation, he supervised the implementation of the death penalty with colleagues. According to Portrait Magazine, they witnessed events at Tianjin's Yangliuqing execution ground in 1983 when the government was cracking down hard on serious crimes.

"I saw convicts shot in the head and fall at my feet," Lu recalled. "The mud, brains and blood splashed on my pants."

The memories are indelible: "Some of them were not killed instantly and they struggled desperately, their arms and legs twitching on the grass."

After that, he wished for an end to the death penalty one day.

Lu has been a college professor and a part-time lawyer. From 2008, he served as deputy chief procurator for three years in Beijing' s Haidian District Procuratorate.

"Although I support repeal of the death penalty, I am also a deputy chief judge of the Supreme People's Court, appointed by the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress in 2012, and I must conduct cases involving the 55 capital offenses under the Criminal Law."

The job includes case instruction and inspection, judicial interpretation, and death penalty case reviews.

He first signed "Approved" in 2013. He had nightmares for a long time afterwards: "The accused walked outside the files in my dreams."

He clearly remembers a handsome Yi nationality youth whose photo stared at him from one case file. "He had more than 1,700 grams of drugs with him when the police caught him," Lu said. "He had the minimum amount with the biggest risk."

Colleagues encouraged Lu to be more detached in his job, but one case from Jiangxi Province reached the Supreme People's Court in 2013 - and caused him to question himself.

"The murderer dismembered the bodies of two girls aged 14 and 11 years," Lu recalled. The victims' photos were not included in the case files, "but two young and pretty faces emerged in my mind." Lu did not hesitate to write "Approved" as the case files had clear facts and indisputable evidence. "I felt angry about the crime and thought I had got rid of an evil person - I felt a release."

But back in the academic environment of the university, his doubts returned.

"Are you a scholar who wants to abolish the death penalty?" he asked himself repeatedly. "Why did you vent your own emotions by approving the death penalty, event though the crime was extreme?

"Finally I realized that I am a human being who has real emotions," he admitted.

Each day, Lu and his colleagues face dozens of case files. Some are eventually tagged "Not Approved".

A jobless woman brutally killed her husband in Sichuan Province. "The victim's body was dismembered and boiled," Lu read. The Supreme People's Court overturned her execution after considering her husband's long history of violent abuse.

"Looked at from the legal and criminological perspectives, the victim had 'obvious fault'," Lu told Xinhua. The woman's crime could be explained as "emotional provocation".

The Supreme People's Court announced it would review all death penalty rulings by lower courts from 2007, ending the 24-year authority of lower courts to issue death sentences and execute criminals without oversight.

Since then, the number of executions has fallen. But Lu refuses to release the detailed figures, saying only that 95 of the cases he handled himself were approved.

Lu has also been involved in case risk evaluation, which examines the possibility of mediation. The judges in charge of death penalty case reviews speak to the victim's relatives, local government, public security bureaus, and sub-district offices.

Only if the case was not a violent crime seriously endangering public security, such as robbery, rape and homicide, and only if there was any mediation possibility, would they examine the possibility of avoiding an execution.

"If any case were mediated successfully, the judges would be immensely happy," Lu said. "A life could go on."

He has never had the opportunity to see a case to mediation - and his self-doubt continues day and night: "We get up at 6 a.m. and cross the city to sit here - just to ratify the death penalty?"

At the court affairs committee every Wednesday, the judges discuss the hard cases to help the presiding judge's work. "The debate sometimes is much more heated than people imagination as the judges still waver between the law and human emotions," Lu said.

China's authorities have long considered abolishing the death penalty.

In 1956, the political report of the eighth National Congress of the Communist Party of China noted that the gradual abolition of the death penalty would help the socialist construction.

And on January 22 this year, the Supreme People's Court reiterated the criteria for capital punishment should be strictly observed so as to ensure "the penalty is only used on an extremely few convicts whose crimes are extremely serious," as part of an initiative to adopt a more prudent attitude toward executions.

"I believe the death penalty will be abolished in China in the near future," Lu said. Endi