"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.