Chinese top judge Xiao Yang said since the Supreme People Court (SPC) took back the power of reviewing death sentences from provincial courts since Jan. 1 last year, capital punishment has been "strictly, cautiously and fairly" meted out to a tiny number of serious criminal offenders in China.

"The transition work has been smooth, orderly and trials of death sentence cases normal," Xiao, president of the Supreme People's Court and chief justice, said in his work report to the ongoing session of the Parliament.

Xiao said the SPC has in the past year improved the procedure for second instance trials of death sentence cases and the procedure for the final review of death penalty with unified criteria applied.

"The SPC has been working to ensure that the capital punishment only applies to the very few number of felons who committed extremely serious, atrocious crimes that lead to grave social consequences," Xiao told the lawmakers.

Xiao did not give the figure on how many people were executed last year. However, presiding judge of the SPC's First Criminal Law Court Huang Ermei said in a recent media interview that the Supreme Court rejected 15 percent of death sentences for reasons including facts to be clarified, lack of evidences and procedural faults since the beginning of last year.

Rozi Ismail, president of the higher people's court of the northwestern Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, told Xinhua that immediate executions after sentences in the region were reduced by half last year compared with 2006.

The SPC taking back the power of reviewing death sentences is a major reform in China's criminal justice system, which provides procedural guarantees for preventing misjudged cases and safeguarding offenders' legal rights, said the Xinjiang judge.

Ying Yong, president of the higher court of Shanghai, said the city was among the first to open second instance trials for death sentence cases to the public, dating back to five years ago.

Ying said that the "cautious death penalty" has proved to improve the quality of court rulings, as the approval rate of death sentences by Shanghai courts over the past year was high, compared with courts in some other regions.

Figures from the Beijing No 1 and No 2 intermediate people's courts suggest that, in the first five months of 2007, the number of death sentences dropped 10 percent from last year.