In China, a quiet push against executions

Nie Shubin (family picture)

Killed in 1994, Nie Shubin has become the face of a growing movement to ban the death penalty

BEIJING – Everyone knew Nie Shubin as a quiet young man, just 20 – gentle, shy, even introverted – the only son of Zhang Huanzhi and husband Nie Xuesheng.

He had a slight stutter when he spoke.

He was a welder at a factory near Shijiazhuang, an industrial town about a three-hour drive south of Beijing. And he owned a blue bicycle – which proved to be his undoing.

After a 38-year-old woman was raped and murdered in a local cornfield, children spoke of seeing a blue bike near the scene.

Police came for Nie, arrested him and beat him until he confessed.

He was convicted after a two-hour trial and executed in customary Chinese fashion: kneeling on the ground, with a single bullet to the back of the head fired at close range.

Nie Shubin's is an old case – the incident took place in 1994.

But what keeps the case current in Chinese legal circles is this: in 2005, another man confessed to the murder in painstaking and convincing detail. Police admitted they believed him.

But Nie's name has never been cleared.

His family grieves still.

Ask lawyers in China why there should be an end to the death penalty – here in a country that executed more people last year than all other countries in the world combined – and the first case they'll mention is Nie Shubin's.

In a society where government control over public information is supreme, the leaked details of Nie's case offer a rare glimpse into the miscarriage of justice in China.

Lawyers and legal scholars fear there may be many more like it. But verifiable information is hard to come by.

That's because the shroud of secrecy that prevails over the use of the death penalty in China is so thick that even the number of people who are executed each year is a state secret.

Amnesty International says a minimum of 1,718 people were executed in China last year.

But the San Francisco-based Dui Hua Foundation, run by business executive-turned-human-rights advocate John Kamm – who still maintains good relations with government officials – estimates the actual figure is even higher.

"We estimate that the number of executions in 2008 exceeded 5,000 and may have been as high as 7,000," he says.

Most, it is believed, still die as Nie did – by gunshot.

In previous decades, it was customary for the state to charge the family of the executed a "bullet fee," that is, the actual cost of the bullet, a practice now said to have ceased.

State officials announced in 1997 that lethal injection was being introduced as a "more humane" means of execution.

And in 2004, a criminal known as Zhang "Nine-Fingered Devil" Shiqiang, was among the first to die by lethal injection in one of China's newly minted mobile death vans.

Officials explained the vans were introduced to promote the greater use of injections as the vehicles could move efficiently through a province from one detention facility to the next, as needed.

But it's not efficiency that rights advocates, senior lawyers and legal scholars hope for. It's the abolition of the death penalty. Achieving it in China won't be easy.

The reasons to end to capital punishment are well known, says veteran Beijing lawyer Mo Shaoping.

"It's a barbaric practice. Once it's done, it can't be undone. And scientific research shows it has very little deterrent effect on the commission of lethal crimes."

But the obstacles to overturning it are huge.

"The idea of paying for a life with a life is just deeply rooted in the culture," says Mo. "Public opinion polls have shown that Chinese people don't support the idea of abolishing the death penalty."

Liu Renwen, a law professor at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, knows all about that.

In 2003, he gave an interview to a state-run magazine in which he raised the idea of abolishing the death penalty.

The online reaction from netizens was "fierce," "offensive" and "even abusive," he says. "More than 90 per cent opposed the idea."

He gave an interview to a different state-run publication last year.

"This time, the majority was still against it. But there were no personal attacks – and the tone wasn't as strong.

"What's more, deeper questions were raised, like whether the abolition of the death penalty might solve the problem of miscarriages of justice."

Other hopeful signs have emerged.

For nearly 25 years, beginning in 1982 when the Supreme People's Court granted lower courts the right to issue death penalties without review, China may have experienced executions on an almost industrial scale.

Some scholars estimate as many as 10,000 people may have been executed in some years.

But on Jan, 1, 2007, the court reasserted its right of review with immediate effect, overturning 15 per cent of all death sentences in that year, many for lack of evidence.

And something else: at the same time executions dropped, so did violent crimes.

"Fewer executions, but a drop in crime. What does this tell us?" Liu Renwen wrote in a scholarly paper. "That the death penalty does not safeguard social order ... that social order could still be maintained with fewer or even zero sentences."

So, if you build a set of persuasive arguments for the abolition of the death penalty, will it come?

Lawyer Mo thinks abolition of the death penalty in China will come, eventually.

But there are practical improvements that can be encouraged in the meantime, he says: that the government should be encouraged to end the secrecy and publish the numbers of those executed and that the array of offences for which a person can be put to death should be reduced from the current 68.

Liu Renwen hopes the day executions end comes during his lifetime.

"Changes are taking place in Chinese people's minds. I think they tend to be more respectful of human life."

In China, 68 crimes can carry the death penalty, including murder, rape and the kidnapping of women and children. "Plotting to jeopardize the sovereignty, territorial integrity and security of the country," can also carry the death penalty. But there are many non-violent crimes on the list, too. These include:
• Breaching dikes
• Looting graves
• Running a house of prostitution
• Sabotaging electrical power
• Smuggling cultural relics
• Taking bribes
• Fraudulent fundraising
• Counterfeiting money
• Credit card fraud
• Smuggling rare plants


Source: The 1997 Criminal Code of the People's Republic of China

Source: The Star, March 29, 2009