Execution still used routinely for minor crimes in China

By Holly Williams

Two years ago, I interviewed a woman named Zhang Huanzhi. Plump, chatty and in her mid 50s, on the face of it she was an ordinary Chinese housewife.

But what she told me touched a nerve, and I find myself thinking about it more often than I would like.

Her son, a young man named Nie Shubin, had been accused of raping and murdering a woman. To say that the evidence against him was thin would be a colossal understatement.

The police arrested him because Nie owned a blue bicycle - the same colour as one that some local children said they’d seen in the area on the day of the crime.

After the police had dragged Nie away Mrs Zhang made frequent visits to the prison where he was held, taking food that she hoped guards would pass along to him.

Neither she nor any other family member was allowed to see him.

One day, the guards told her to stop coming. Nie had already been executed, they said, so there was really no point.

He was 21 years old when he died. In a photo taken just before he was arrested he stands proudly beside the motorbike he has just bought with his new job as an electrician, a young man on the brink of adulthood.

Nie Shubin would have been executed in the prescribed manner - cuffed at the ankles and wrists and forced to kneel on the ground while a single executioner approached him from behind and shot a bullet into the back of his neck.

He was killed by the Chinese state after a closed trial that lasted just two hours, and in which the key evidence was his confession to the crime - a confession that is widely believed to have been extracted through torture, which is illegal but routinely practised by police here.

But perhaps the worst part of Mrs Zhang’s story is that it is not isolated.

I’ve spent nearly 10 years living in China, and have heard similar horror stories in every corner of the country.

I’ve met a survivor of Death Row - a man who explained to me in a whisper how he’d been tortured into confessing crimes he knew nothing about.

In Sichuan Province, I ran across a man who had once worked as an executioner, and who told me he still spent sleepless nights thinking about one of his victims - a farmer given the death penalty for stealing some of his neighbour’s pigs.

And I’ve visited hospitals where doctors openly admitted that they used organs extracted from executed prisoners, selling them on to foreign transplant patients for the highest price.

Today’s figures from Amnesty International - that show China executing more people than the rest of the world in 2008, and nearly three quarters of the world’s total - bear testament to Beijing’s continuing and enthusiastic use of the death penalty.

The government says it’s an effective way of preventing crime. Officials here sometimes justify the number of executions carried out in China by quoting a traditional saying: “Kill the chicken to scare the rooster.”

Interestingly, though, crime rates continue to rise in China, despite the fact that its citizens can now be executed for over 60 different crimes - everything from tax evasion to damaging electrical facilities and even killing a panda.

The government is, however, sensitive to outside criticism. In 2006, following widespread media coverage, it banned the sale of executed prisoners’ organs for transplant.

Since 2007, all death penalties must also be approved by the Supreme People’s Court in Beijing, a reform designed to prevent abuses by local courts.

Would it have been enough to save Nie Shubin’s young life? Perhaps. But his family will never know.

And, according to Amnesty International’s statistics, more than 1,700 other Chinese families also lost their loved ones last year - many for crimes that wouldn’t even merit a jail term in other countries.

via Sky News.

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