Death for officer who killed pregnant woman
Print Edition
A DEPUTY police chief who shot and killed a pregnant woman and injured her husband while drunk was sentenced to death yesterday.
Hu Ping was also ordered to pay the victim’s family 73,324 yuan (US$12,089) by the Guigang Intermediate People’s Court in the southern Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region.
Hu said he would lodge an appeal against the judgment with a higher court.
Wu Ying, who was five-months pregnant, and her husband Cai Shiyong were tending to their rice-noodle store on October 28 when Hu, drunk and shirtless, entered and demanded milk tea.
After Wu responded that the store did not serve milk tea, the officer opened fire, wounding Cai in the shoulder and killing Wu and her unborn child.
When the case came to trial on February 13, prosecutors urged the court to impose a heavy sentence in view of Hu’s position as an officer of the law in Pingnan County. Hu’s lawyers called for leniency in light of the fact that he had handed himself in to police.
Hu argued in court that he shot the couple because Cai had tried to steal his gun. But several witnesses told the court Hu shot the couple first.
A medical examination determined that Hu was drunk at the time of the incident, but not so intoxicated as to be unaware of his actions. He was fully responsible for what he did, the medical report said.
Hu pled guilty and apologized to Wu’s relatives during the last session of the trial. But the family said it would never forgive him.
Wu’s parents had filed a compensation claim for more than 1.23 million yuan (US$203,000) to cover medical bills, funeral expenses and mental suffering.
The family has already received 700,000 yuan from the local government.
Huang Xingrong, Pingnan Party chief, said the authorities did not want the family to wait for a court settlement to receive compensation and would ask Hu to repay the money.
Last week, the Party’s Central Politics and Law Commission said Hu had been fired from the police and expelled from the Party.
Zhou Xian, head of the Pingnan police, and Li Jian, a political commissar for the police, were also removed from their Party and government posts.
In the weeks after the Hu case hit the headlines, the government announced that it was banning police officers drinking outside their own home.
Internet users welcomed the sentence, with one poster on Sina Weibo saying: “Death would not be a sufficient punishment for Hu’s crime.”
Stories of abuses involving police and chengguan, or urban management officers, regularly trigger outcries in China.
In one of the highest-profile examples, four chengguan in central Hunan Province were sentenced in December to between three and a half and 11 years in prison over a dispute that left a roadside watermelon vendor dead.
Local media reported that the officers beat the vendor to death for operating without a license, with one smashing his head with a metal measuring weight.
In 2009, a police officer in southwest China’s Yunnan province was sentenced to death for killing a man in an argument, although the sentence was later commuted.
Chengguan, tasked with enforcing local government regulations, have gained particular notoriety for abusing their power.
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