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 - 2020
- 1494: Joan Boughton, "old cankered heretic" - 2019
- 1708: William Gregg, spy of slob - 2018
- 1909: A triple execution in Chalco - 2017
- 1770: King David Hartley, Yorkshire coiner - 2016
- 1634: Mikhail Borisovich Shein, for failing to take Smolensk - 2015
- 1876: The slave Francisco, Brazil's last execution - 2014
- 1899: Not J.M. Olberman, spared by Oregon's governor - 2013
- 1945: Hermann Fegelein, Eva Braun's brother-in-law - 2012
- 1882: George Henry Lamson, aconitine poisoner - 2011
- 1772: Johann Friedrich Struensee, the doctor who ran Denmark - 2009
- 1945: Benito Mussolini, his mistress, and his aides - 2008