Fat Years - Chan Koonchung [23]
While I was in college, people had their Rightist status removed and many who had suffered miscarriages of justice during the Cultural Revolution received political rehabilitation. Even the Gang of Four were given a trial, and state-appointed lawyers to defend them. I was full of hope for the future and utterly confident that the Communist Party intended to create a society governed by the rule of law.
I graduated in 1983 and was assigned to a county-level court under the Beijing jurisdiction to serve as a legal clerk-secretary. That was when my nightmare began.
I was twenty-two years old when I arrived at my work unit in August. Everyone else there had just finished studying Party Central’s August 25 document “Decision on Severely Cracking Down on Criminal Activity.” They briefly explained the “spirit” of the document to me and then they let me get to work. I’d always hated to see the guilty prosper and the innocent suffer, and so I was naturally very much in favor of the Party and government’s policy of severely and rapidly punishing criminal activity according to the law. I was certain I would not be soft on criminals. What I didn’t know, however, was that the “severely and rapidly” that I had in mind was not the “severely” or “rapidly” that they practiced. Maybe I hadn’t had enough psychological preparation, and perhaps my idea of the rule of law was too far removed from reality. In any case, the problems began as soon as I started work.
The correct procedure in criminal cases was for the Public Security Bureau to arrest people, the prosecutor’s office to bring charges, and the judges to decide the verdict and the sentence. In order to process cases rapidly the Public Security Bureau, the prosecutor’s office, and the legal division each assigned two people. All of us worked in an office of the Public Security Bureau. The arrest, investigation, decision, and the sentencing all took place practically at the same time. In those days, nobody much understood the function of a prosecutor. Our judicial unit assigned two people of the lowest secretarial rank—a retired army officer who was politically reliable but who had had no legal training and me, someone who had just graduated from law school and who was also a young woman. In this way, the chief and deputy chief of the local Public Security Bureau basically controlled everything.
I was ready to fall apart by the end of the very first day. In every case, big or small, the accused was given the death sentence, and not one of the crimes involved murder. Robbery received a death sentence, petty theft received a death sentence, swindling received a death sentence, and no one paid any attention at all when the accused produced solid exculpatory evidence.
There was one case in which a young man had sexual relations with a young woman, her family came after him, the two sides had a fight, and they all received minor injuries. The girl’s family went to the Public Security Bureau and had the boy arrested. The boy’s family knew that this was potentially a very serious situation for him during this crackdown period. The whole family went over and knelt down in front of the girl’s house to beg them to withdraw the charge, but the girl’s family refused. When the case came to our six-person group, the Public Security chief asked us, “What is the sentence for the crime of hooliganism?” “This crime does not merit the death penalty!” I exclaimed as soon as I could. The other five group members stared at me in silent rebuke. In the end the boy was given an indefinite sentence of labor reform in far-off Xinjiang Province.
After court that day, the deputy chief of Public Security came over to us clutching a report and said, “Other places are all executing ten or more people by firing squad … Just look at Henan Province. Zhengzhou, Kaifeng, and Luoyang all executed forty or fifty people at the same time. Even a place like Jiaozuo executed thirty at the same time. But we haven’t even reached double figures. What do you