Monday, July 31, 2006

The Chinese approach to public corruption -- death sentence

I'm OK with this. Some of these US corporate fraudsters might think twice about running a scam on stockholders or the public if they knew they stood a good chance of a bullet in the back of the head.

Xinhua
...Wen Mengjie, former head of the technology division under the Beijing branch of the Agricultural Bank of China, raked 10.73 million yuan (about 1.34 million U.S. dollars) from equipment and software providers and illicitly seized 4.32 million yuan (540,000 U.S. dollars) of public money.

He was sentenced to death in July, 2006, and the ruling is now undergoing a routine review at the Supreme Court. ...

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Dude, I am so behind this as well. One of my favorite questions on the subject is "at what point does the harm done by a white collar criminal exceed the justice point for a violent criminal?" Why does our legal system treat a guy who ruined 5,000 families' savings and retirement plans like a scoundrel, but treats a murderer who kills one of the provides of those 5,000 families like a horrible monster who is significantly worse than the former?

Actually, this is where the 13th amendment should kick in. IIRC, the 13th amendment would allow him to be basically turned into slave labor for life to repay the cost of his crime. For such men, that might actually qualify as a fate worse than death since they'd be legally reduced to the legal standing of an ante-bellum plantation slave. Who wants to bet that more than 5 black people actually find PC grounds to object to that ;)

nanc said...

as a christian, i know that God does not weigh sin - one is as the next if no forgiveness is asked, so i'll go out on a limb and say, sure - go for it!