Abstract：Currently, the proportion of minor crime cases and the rate of light sentences in our country are steadily increasing. Faced with a large number of minor crime cases, the approach that focuses on punishing crimes while neglecting governance will lead to the overdraft of judicial resources and an increase in governance risks, among other social issues. How to achieve differentiated governance of minor and serious crimes and promote the rationalization and balance of crime and punishment has become a significant issue in the governance of crime in the new era. In the governance of minor crimes, drunk-driving governance is undoubtedly the most typical microcosm. Taking the perspective of minor crime governance can fundamentally provide new ideas for drunk-driving governance. Minor crime governance contains two levels of theory and practice, corresponding to the concepts of minor crime and minor case. Minor crime is a theoretical concept, using the statutory penalty as a standard, aiming at achieving the diversion of litigation procedures between minor and serious crimes and highlighting the governance orientation of “education as the main focus, punishment as a supplement, and prevention as the key” for minor crimes. Minor case is a practical concept, which refers to the overall need for lenient treatment of minor crime cases after a comprehensive evaluation of the objective dangerousness of the behavior, the subjectivity of the perpetrator, and the possibility of re-offending. The aim is to accurately implement the criminal policy of combining leniency and strictness and to prevent the erroneous practice of treating minor crimes uniformly leniently or punishing them excessively. “Minor crime→minor case” is the basic law and inevitable path from theory to practice in minor crime governance, which not only resolves the opposition between the statutory penalty theory and the intended penalty theory in the concept of minor crime but also provides a fundamental basis for the judicial adoption of a “violation→minor crime→minor case” full-process hierarchical filtering model in drunk-driving governance. The value of the hierarchical model of drunk-driving governance lies in its ability to more accurately implement the criminal policy of combining leniency and strictness, more appropriately handle the relationship between criminal law and administrative law, and more finely deal with illegal behaviors of different degrees. The first filtering of “violation→minor crime” in the hierarchical model of drunk-driving governance aims at distinguishing the broad sense of “drunk-driving violation” into administrative violations and criminal offenses for separate handling, and should adhere to strict investigation and the principle of legality in crime and punishment, ensuring that the crime is legally established and the exemption from crime is reasonable. It is neither allowed to recognize behaviors outside the semantic scope of the constitutive elements as crimes, nor to exclude circumstances of “obvious minor harm” in the crime of drunk-driving from the scope of crime according to the “but” provision of Article 13 of the Criminal Law. The second filtering of “minor crime→minor case” aims at distinguishing criminal offenses into minor cases and non-minor cases for separate handling, and should adhere to the principle of combining leniency and strictness. The key is to comprehensively evaluate the case’s severe and lenient circumstances in combination with social harm and the possibility of re-offending to achieve proportional punishment. In addition, the issue of drunk-driving governance is at the intersection of administrative law and criminal law, and it is necessary to properly handle the normative conflicts in responsibility pursuit, the concurrency of administrative and criminal responsibility, and the procedural connection between administrative enforcement and criminal justice, in order to achieve joint governance of administration and punishment in drunk-driving governance. However, to more thoroughly carry out drunk-driving governance, some root institutional issues still need to be resolved in legislation, such as the overly severe consequences of crime, and the lack of procedural pathways for minor crimes to be exempted from punishment, etc. For this, it is necessary to establish a system for the destruction of criminal records and a conditional non-prosecution system for minor crimes.
2024, Vol. 54 
