10 Jul Death Penalty for Non-Violent Crime
China sentenced Zheng Xiaoyu, former drug and food safety chief, to death yesterday for corruption. He was convicted of taking $850,000 in bribes from eight companies. The Chinese high court reportedly ruled that “Zheng Xiaoyu’s grave irresponsibility in pharmaceutical safety inspection and failure to conscientiously carry out his duties seriously damaged the interests of the state and people.”
Amnesty has a tremendous amount of information about the death penalty in China. See here, here, and here. But I can’t find information about how common it is for the death penalty to be imposed for non-violent crime. Do any of our readers know if this is common in China or elsewhere?
Article 6(2) of the ICCPR provides that: “In countries which have not abolished the death penalty, sentence of death may be imposed only for the most serious crimes…” As Amnesty reports here, in resolution 2005/59, adopted on 20 April 2005, the UN Commission on Human Rights urged all states that still maintain the death penalty “to ensure… that the death penalty is not imposed for non-violent acts such as financial crimes, religious practice or expression of conscience and sexual relations between consenting adults”.
Imposing the death penalty for non-violent crime is not especially uncommon. The UN Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial executions has sent quite a few communications on the issue to governments, such as this one to Vietnam and this one to Iran.
There is also a fairly detailed legal analysis with lots of other examples in his last report to the Human Rights Council – A/HRC/4/20.
Incidentally, no one (outside of the government of China) really knows how common executions for non-violent crimes are there, but it’s clearly not usual.
There was an interesting book published a few years back (in Chinese with accompanying English translation) in which a number of Chinese jurists discussed the use of the death penalty for various particular non-violent crimes.
The Road to the Abolition of the Death Penalty in China: Regarding the Abolition of the Non-Violent Crime at the Present Stage (Press of Chinese People’s Public Security University of China, 2004)
I’m leaving aside the question of whether or not I agree with what has happened here, as it’s not germane to the question I’m asking.
But take this example. A man puts a toxic chemical in his wife’s tea in the expectation that it will harm her, perhaps even kill her. He’d like to cash in her life insurance.
He’d very likely be guilty of attempted murder, wouldn’t he? (specific details will depend on the specific laws in his jurisdiction).
So if you have a man who puts a potentially toxic chemical into large numbers of people for financial gain, and he is reckless as to whether people are harmed by it, what kind of crime is it? Is it a financial crime? Is it on a par with personally trying to kill them? Or is it in some lacuna that we haven’t figured out how to fill?
Following up on the previous comment, how “nonviolent” is this crime. The perpetrator engaged in conduct that exposed thousands (millions?) to an increased risk of death. That seems pretty violent to me.
Take another example: As a result of a bribe, a judge excludes exculpatory evidence. The (innocent) defendant is executed. Has the judge committed a “nonviolent” crime?
I’m against killing people. Whether it’s the government or a deranged crack addict. But I will say that some people are really asking for it and this guy was REALLY asking for it. He was killing people with his actions and getting rich by doing it. I can’t say that I’m sorry for him and I think that some United States Government officials and Insurance Executives harm us in much the same way and are just as guilty as this guy. Insurance companies gladly take your money and then set quotas and pressure or reward their employees if they reject a set percentage of claims. People die over this. People who have paid for and are entitled to coverage of these treatments.
…And, in another more gruesome violation of the ICCPR, the Iranian government has just confirmed that it has executed a man convicted of adultery, and that it did so by stoning, as prescribed by Sharia law.
According to the AP article, capital offenses in Iran include murder, rape, armed robbery, apostasy, blasphemy, serious drug trafficking, adultery or prostitution, treason and espionage.
It is common in many countries to impose the death penalty for the crime of treason, which in many (if not most) cases involves non-violent act(s) and/or abuse(s) of official privilege. A key point that the prosecution has to prove is that the person’s willful act(s)/abuse(s) significantly damaged national interests, which directly/indirectly hurts the people of the nation.
By Western conventions, it’s understandable that this swift and harsh sentence against a government official for corruption may seem jarring, but the logic really isn’t that far-fetched and can even be argued under Western legal systems if it weren’t for existing traditions.
It is in not common for China to execute for non-violent crimes, but it is all too typical for China to react with unprecedented harshness for any type of international embarrasment.