Widespread sympathy for murderer, criticism for justice system
Beijing (AsiaNews/Agencies) – Yang Jia has become an unlikely hero to many people for his response to police violence. Convicted of killing six cops in Shanghai’s Zhabei district he was executed on 26 November but in so doing the authorities have made him a symbol of people’s distrust in the justice system.
Yang, a 28-year-old jobless man, stabbed nine policemen on 1 July, killing six and wounding the other three. Because of the circumstances of the case he received a lot of sympathy from ordinary Chinese who could identify with his reaction to an unfair arrest and the torture inflicted earlier upon him by police in prison. Equally significant his trial failed to meet the most basic standards of fairness. The defendant in fact was not allowed to choose his defence attorney and the lawyer his father hired for him was barred from the courtroom and was instead replaced by a state-appointed attorney employed by the Zhabei district government. The same family-hired lawyer was also not allowed to take part in the appeal process and Yang’s chance of pleading insanity or reduced mental capacities was quickly dismissed. All in all the trial, including the appeal phase, lasted three months.
Yang’s mother, Wang Jingmei, the only one who knew about the mistreatment he had received, vanished during the trial. It was eventually reported that she had been held at the police-run Ankang Mental Hospital in Beijing
The execution was carried out as speedily as the trial with the family, which lives in Beijing, informed just the night before.
During the trial in Shanghai hundreds of people protested outside the courthouse, carrying banners that read ‘Long live the hero with a knife!’
In the space of a few days at the end of October, more than 2,500 people added their names to an online petition, including well-known public figures, before it was promptly shut down.
After Yang's execution last Wednesday, one blogger urged people to mourn for three days by abstaining from meat.
“The real problem with China's legal system is that it’s under the Communist Party's control," said Danny Gittings, a University of Hong Kong expert on the mainland's legal system.
“The procuratorate, public security and judiciary are separate organisations, but all [are] under the control of the same arm of the party—the political-legal committees which exist at every level of the state,” Mr Gittings said, adding that “there's still no sign of any willingness to address the fundamental problem—the lack of a legal system independent from the state.”
For many experts point out China’s legal system is used to repress all forms of dissent rather than protect rights.
Recent examples are cases in point. In the melamine-tainted milk scandals families have not been allowed to sue the state for damages.
The death penalty has also been criticised.
“It's too easy to sentence an innocent person to death and too difficult to overturn it once the verdict is passed,” Xian’s lawyer Zhu Zhanping said.
In mainland China 68 offences carry the death penalty, including non-violent crimes like tax evasion and panda poaching.
One of the most notorious cases is that of a Chinese farmer who was sentenced to death for killing his wife. Luckily for him she returned home before his execution after an 11-year absence.
During his trial’s appeal phase he testified that police used torture to extract a detailed confession from him.
And it is significant that the standard procedure to "shame" defendants by parading them in public is no longer enforced since March 2007 when the authorities banned it.
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14/09/2007
