This morning in Nanping, China, former doctor Zheng Minsheng was shot to death for a headline-grabbing knife attack on schoolchildren just five weeks ago.
In a brazen attack as efficient as it was unanticipated, Zheng knifed 13 kids at Nanping City Experimental Elementary School on March 23. Eight of them died.
“The methods used by the defendant Zheng Minsheng were extremely savage, the circumstances of the crime were particularly evil,” the Fujian Province high court said in rejecting his appeal.
The apparent motivation? Being jilted by his girlfriend.
That’s not the sort of trigger calculated to impress Chinese courts that have little sympathy for mental illness claims.
For this shocking crime, justice was swift. But you’d have to question its deterrent effect, since there was yet another high-profile knifing attack on schoolchildren on the very day of Zheng’s execution — part of an “alarming spate of school knifings.”
On this day..
- 1876: Louis Thomas, gallows builder
- 1494: Joan Boughton, "old cankered heretic"
- 1708: William Gregg, spy of slob
- 1909: A triple execution in Chalco
- 1770: King David Hartley, Yorkshire coiner
- 1634: Mikhail Borisovich Shein, for failing to take Smolensk
- 1876: The slave Francisco, Brazil's last execution
- 1899: Not J.M. Olberman, spared by Oregon's governor
- 1945: Hermann Fegelein, Eva Braun's brother-in-law
- 1882: George Henry Lamson, aconitine poisoner
- 1772: Johann Friedrich Struensee, the doctor who ran Denmark
- 1945: Benito Mussolini, his mistress, and his aides
Deterrent effect? Has the threat of jail time ever deterred a career criminal? Or someone who thinks they’re clever enough to “get away with it”? Or organized crime?
Given the speed and certainty of a death sentence in China -and the common knowledge of those facts- I’d say deterrence is a moot point; it’s about power, control, punishment.
When I feel this kind of the crime is an extramely huge sin to our
society and say this person has no humanity, some people appeared in cyber space. They told me that zheng minsheng is actually a victime of the society. They said that our society hurts good people. He does his job very good, so he doesn’t depend on black medical curing behaviour to earn immoral money. So his family is a poor one. He lived with his many family members in a very small house. You know ~
In china the land is rare, we have no much lands and the house is a business, so the house price is very expensive. In chinese, we call this as ” wo ju” or “snail living”. In this age, his girl friend
didn’t want to marry him, because he has no much money because his upright. In his family, his brother was mocking him for his jobless. I am a mental disorder person and I feel my brother is mocking me as well. Sometimes, i think about how to make the DNA program as a glorious plan to the world. If time machine can be in the society, the history won’t be the same. If the history is changed in people’s life as the fighting never end, to be famours is a good thing. You don’t need to care how to make yourself a famours person. You just need to do big crime and killing accidents, this will be the law to give you what you want to have in this world. Or just fuck the society. But wait … “fuck society” is a kind of implantation. When you angery, you will destory everything in this world. Our teacher said this is the man’s behaviour. Women? They just cry and feel hurt. Zheng minsheng is a man and he feel angery. If there is any one feel bad in the society, of course… society will suffer. But after all of these pain, we can think about what is the reason of this accident. Maybe economy data told us already … maybe not …