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| A Chinese police officer lights an inmate's last cigarette moments before his execution. |
BEIJING — There was an ear-splitting whistle and Kong Ning, a young supervising officer from Beijing, saw blood spurt from the bodies of the 34 prisoners, all men in their 20s and 30s, kneeling in a row in front of her. One man’s head was blown off completely. She collapsed on the muddy ground.
Ms. Kong was traumatized by the executions, which she watched over on a bitterly cold day in November 1983, when China’s first wave of “strike-hard” campaigns against rising crime was in full swing. After the event, she quit her job and became a lawyer in the hope of defending people unjustly accused of crime. But over the years she suffered several mental breakdowns, at one point being admitted to a psychiatric hospital for a few months. Now, she always dresses in black — and she always wears a bulletproof vest.
In 2006, she started to paint, primarily as a way to cope with the trauma that had changed her life. She has also staged performances, reliving that terrifying incident.
Beyond the forays into art, Ms. Kong tells her story every chance she gets, hoping to expose the cruelty of the death penalty, calling for its abolition in China and the rest of the world. Her story and interviews have been published in art magazines and have been circulated on the Internet.
This jailer-turned-lawyer-turned-artist may be one of a kind. But Ms. Kong is not alone. In addition to a band of committed and courageous human rights lawyers, there are others publicly advocating the abolition of capital punishment.
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Source: The New York Times, The Opinion Pages, Lijia Zhang, December 29, 2014
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