evo kako to rade braca kosooki
:D
Executions in China
The bullet or the needle
Jan 10th 2008 | BEIJING
From The Economist print edition
A change in technique for the world's busiest executioners?
CHINA'S leaders love talking about all the indicators that show China leading the world. Whether it is growth rates, production figures or trade volumes, officials relish any chance to unleash a barrage of dazzling statistics. They are less gung-ho about another category where China leaves the world trailing: use of the death penalty. Indeed, the number of Chinese criminal executions remains a state secret.
AFP
The old-fashioned way
Foreign human-rights groups make valiant efforts to scour local press reports and tally the sums, but reckon they hear about only a fraction of the cases.
In 2006 Amnesty International, a human-rights lobbying group, counted 2,790 people sentenced to death in China and 1,010 executed. Other groups put annual executions at 7,500 or more. Even per head, using low estimates, China probably outstrips every country but Singapore. It also has a greater number of capital offences than anywhere else: more than 60. These include murder and other violent crimes, but also smuggling, drug trafficking and many “economic crimes” such as bribe-taking, embezzlement and even tax evasion.
This month it was revealed that China is planning a big change. The traditional method of execution—a single bullet to the back of the convict's head—is to be replaced by a lethal injection. Jiang Xingchang, of the Supreme People's Court, told the press this is because injections are considered “more humane”. The option was first authorised experimentally in China in 1997 and has since been used in many cities, including Kunming, Wuhan, Chengdu and Shanghai. Mr Jiang did not provide a timetable for an end to death by gunshot, but said the newer method has been favourably received by “all quarters of society, including those sentenced to death and their families.”
Some foreign critics disapprove. A statement from Amnesty said China's expanded use of lethal injections “flies in the face” of international trends away from capital punishment—which this year have seen even dictatorial Uzbekistan abandon the death penalty. The statement also cited the well-documented flaws in China's shoddy legal system and argued that a switch to lethal injection would do nothing to solve such problems as the arbitrary enforcement of the law or the execution of innocents. Recent years have seen a handful of cases in which Chinese defendants who had been sentenced to death, or even executed, were later found innocent. Chinese and foreign legal experts agree that an important cause of this, which China could do much more to eradicate, is the common police practice of extracting confessions through torture.
There is also cause to challenge claims that lethal injections are more humane. This week America's Supreme Court began hearing a case, brought by two condemned inmates in Kentucky, alleging that injections can cause agonising pain, and thereby violate a constitutional bar on “cruel and unusual” punishment.
In any event, China's interest in treating criminals more humanely has limits. This month the chief justice, Xiao Yang, said China might one day like to abolish capital punishment altogether. But that day would not dawn soon, because Chinese people believe strongly in the notion of an “eye for an eye and a life for a life”. Not to mention tax evasion, of course.
ja nisam za cruel and unusual punishment jer ipak nisam ni ja toliki psihipata da se nasladjuem torturom drugih -- objesi ga i gotovo brate
