On September 11, 2016, the Academic Seminar in Commemoration of the Tenth Anniversary of the Withdrawal by the Supreme People’s Court of the Power of Approval of Death Sentences from Lower-level People’s Courts was held in Beijing. The seminar was attended by representatives of legal scholars, judicial officials, and lawyers in China, who carried out discussions on the significance and the effect of the withdrawal by the Supreme People’s Court of the power of approval of death sentences from lower-level people’s courts and on the ways of further promoting the development and perfection of the death sentence review procedure and safeguarding the lawyer’s right of participation in death penalty cases. Professor Xiong Qiuhong, the head of the Procedure Law Department of CASS Law Institute, gave a speech at the seminar. In her speech, she stressed the need to re-discover the functional orientation of the death penalty cases review procedure: if its function as a remedy procedure is to be emphasized, then reform measures should taken to strengthen legal aid and the lawyer’s concrete defense rights; if its function as a supervisory procedure is to be emphasized, then the cooperation between provincial-level procuratorates and the Supreme People’s Court should be strengthened; and if its function as an adjudicative procedure is to be emphasized, then the Court, as a neutral arbitrator, should make more efforts in giving equal treatment to the opinions of both the prosecution and the defense. China should choose a priority among the above-mentioned three functions of the death penalty case review procedure.