“Threshold of corruption” redefined
China has instituted a new penalty for officials convicted of corruption—a life sentence without the possibility of parole. According to the China Daily, in the past a death sentence with a two-year reprieve could be commuted to life if the prisoner behaved well behind bars. Similarly, a life sentence could be further reduced for those who complied with prison rules.
But under the new interpretation, convicts will never leave prison if they get a life term.
“Convicts given such punishment will spend the rest of their life in prison, no matter how well they behave while serving their sentences,” said Pei Xianding, chief judge of the criminal tribunal under the Supreme People’s Court. “For some defendants, the death penalty is too heavy and a suspended death sentence too light, so we made the new sentence after research and discussion, in a move to ensure punishments will be in line with offenses.”
He added that the death penalty is still an option in corruption cases. “For those whose offenses meet the requirements of the death penalty, the courts will sentence them to death without hesitation,” he said.
Professor Zhou Guangquan, who teaches criminal law at Tsinghua University, said the new sentencing option “must be enforced unconditionally. Defendants given such a penalty will not be released or have their sentence commuted.”
It may be cold comfort for those investigated in corruption cases that the criminal standard has also been redefined by the court. The threshold of corruption has been raised to 30,000 yuan (US$4,630), reports the Daily, “because the 5,000 yuan standard in the 1997 version could not keep pace with economic development,” said Chen Xingliang, a law professor at Peking University (5,000 yuan is less than US$772).
On the other hand, the definition of ill-gotten gain in corruption cases has also been extended, said Miao Youshui, deputy chief judge of the criminal tribunal. “For example, house decoration, paying debts or trips will also be defined as bribery,” he said.
From 2013 to 2015, Chinese courts prosecuted almost 70,000 cases of corruption; of those, almost 4,500 involved 1 million yuan or more.
