Technology plays growing role in procuratorial casework

Procuratorial departments across China have handled more than 267,000 technical cases since May 2024, as technologies including artificial intelligence, satellite remote sensing and electronic evidence analysis play a growing role in judicial case handling, a senior prosecutor said on Monday.

Zhang Xueqiao, deputy procurator-general of the Supreme People's Procuratorate, said at a news conference that 267,123 technical cases had been handled since the SPP issued guidelines on strengthening procuratorial technical work in May 2024.

Procuratorial technical personnel now deal not only with traditional issues such as fingerprints, traces, causes of death and injury assessment, but also emerging areas including electronic evidence, environmental damage, virtual autopsies and AI-generated deepfakes, Zhang said.

Technical expertise has also helped prosecutors establish key evidence in criminal cases.

In one case, a man surnamed Geng mailed poisoned bottled drinks to his former girlfriend in 2025 with the intention of killing her. She did not drink them, but two people living with her did and suffered poisoning.

Geng denied intending to kill her, but a technical examination found that the amount of poison detected in the drinks contradicted his account. Prosecutors, assisted by specialists in electronic data and forensic medicine, recovered computer records showing that Geng had searched for information about the poison and its lethal dosage.

They also retrieved a deleted document detailing plans to purchase the substance, contaminate the drinks, send them by courier and destroy evidence.

The evidence supported the charge of intentional homicide. Geng was sentenced to eight years in prison and deprived of political rights for one year in March 2026.

Technology is also playing an increasingly important role in environmental public interest litigation. Procuratorates have combined satellite remote sensing, drone photography and rapid on-site testing with laboratory analysis, big-data comparisons and AI screening to identify case leads, collect evidence and assess ecological restoration, Zhang said.

The SPP's remote sensing application platform now covers nearly 400 procuratorates at the prefecture level and above and has processed more than 10,000 satellite images. It has assisted cases involving water environment governance in the Pearl River basin and ecological protection around the Bohai Sea, providing scientific support for addressing watershed governance, a challenge faced worldwide, Zhang said.

Food safety is another key application area. In a 2025 meat adulteration case in Beijing, technicians used DNA testing to identify animal-derived ingredients in food products. The method was later expanded, with the SPP's DNA laboratory handling 142 related cases and examining more than 1,000 samples.

Zhang also noted an imbalance in technical resources, which are concentrated mainly at higher-level procuratorates, while many cases requiring technical support arise at the grassroots level.

To address the problem, procuratorial authorities have established mechanisms for sharing technical resources across different levels and regions.

In the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region, for example, prosecutors can use cloud-based laboratories to seek remote technical support from counterparts in Jiangsu province for difficult cases.