Crime and Punishment

Photo © orangesparrow from Flickr

I can’t prove it, but I’m pretty sure the Chinese legal system works like a lottery. The judges, if they haven’t been bribed or given a decision by higher officials, spin a comically oversized wheel a la Wheel of Fortune or Price is Right and go with whatever it says.

This morning, the Intermediate People’s Court of Xi’an sentenced Yao Jiaxin, the 21-year-old student at the Xi’an Conservatory of Music who ran over and subsequently stabbed to death cafeteria assistant Zhang Miao, because, as we all know, a “peasant woman would be hard to deal with.”