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Former local Party chief tossed back into prison
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A FORMER Party chief of an eastern Chinese city has resumed his life behind bars after enjoying eight years of medical parole as state authorities have tightened up on the leeway granted in prison sentences.
Hu Jianxue is one among the 76 convicted senior officials who should be sent back to prison, according to the Supreme People’s Procuratorate.
Most have been granted parole or medical leave. At the same time, prosecutors nationwide have asked that 711 criminals be sent back to jail, according to a spokesperson of the supreme procuratorate.
It was reported that Hu, former Party secretary of the city of Tai’an in Shandong Province, was granted medical parole in 2006. He later opened two companies and lived with his wife in Jinan, Shandong’s capital. It seems that Hu’s life had become just the same as most of ours, but news reports reminded us that he hadn’t completed his jail term.
According to the Chongqing Youth Daily, Hu was deputy editor of a newspaper circulated in Liaocheng Prison. It was his job there. He stayed with some convicted officials during exercise in the prison courtyard but kept away from other inmates.
Hu had privileges even though he was once put on death row. He was sentenced to death with a two-year retrieve in June 1996 for accepting bribes. That was later commuted to 15 1/2 years of imprisonment.
Exaggerated illness
But he left his prison cell for a hospital in 2006 with an exaggerated physical condition and never returned to prison, according to the newspaper.
People might surmise that high walls are not a mission impassable for people like Hu or those with similar backgrounds. But for most people, high walls would be irresistible nightmares about which they could do nothing.
About two weeks ago, Nian Bin was pronounced not guilty in a final verdict at Fujian Higher People’s Court. Before that he had been sentenced to death four times for poisoning his neighbors eight year ago. However, the murder case lacked evidence from the very beginning. Nian Bin was tortured during interrogation while police officers were suspected of falsifying evidence.
Once a schoolmate contacted me saying he was moved to a prison in Anhui Province to be a prosecutor for inspection there. He never told me the exact nature of his job there.
But as a law school graduate I’d say that at least part of his duty was to find any wrongly convicted or wrongly released prisoners. I have no idea whether he found any. But it cannot be denied that loopholes widely exist in our justice system.
Hu Jianxue once slipped through the net but Nian Bin suffered unexpected misfortune. They are just two figures exposed by media very recently and among the many people who have had different fates under the system.
My former dean is now the top prosecutor of our nation. I wish his department could carry out a nationwide review of any suspicious sentences.
We share the burden of never wrongly holding or imprisoning a good person nor letting a single bad one off the hook.
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