This Link Tells about Yuan Baojing, a 39 year old real estate tycoon (worth about 50 billion$) in China. He was convicted of murder by Chinese courts and sentenced to die. He got his wife to sign over about six billion dollars worth of assets over to the Chinese government a couple of days before the execution date. He was scheduled to be executed on October 14. Several days later, when it was learned that he was still alive, is when I saw this story.
I’m so interested in this because I know China is notorious for executing large numbers of criminals. I was pretty stunned when I heard about this man who *actually * paid for his life. I am also kind of amazed to see an actual price paid. I don’t think anybody has ever successfully paid there way out of any state execution in recent years (especially in China). It will be interesting to find out if they end up killing him, if he spends the rest of his life in jail, or they let him go free.
Plus, as this list points out, China will execute you for many reasons, such as:
*An abridged quote from this wikipedia page *
In theory or reality? In theory, no. In reality, yes and the sum doesn’t usually have to be that huge. Just big enough to hire a better lawyer than the prosecuting attorney.
Probably not, but a bit of moot point, wouldn’t you say?
The closest analogy I can thing of is when the now deceased Frank (Tough man to make a tender chicken) Perdue basically bought his way out of a reckless driving rap by paying the deceased family a large sum of money to drop the case.
As an interesting side note it was then defense Atty (now Senator) Arlen Specter that got him off.
You got an unbiased cite for that one? One that wasn’t written by some anti-chicken whackos?
I just read the newspaper stories from 1975, and a Pennsylvania Grand Jury refused to indict Perdue. And, yes, Specter was his attorney. So, did Perdue pay off the entire grand jury?
Actually, I’m trying to remember if that was the right case or not. I am located in Salisbury, MD and Perdue’s utterly reckless driving habits and notorious disregard for traffic laws are/were a hard fact.
IIRC there was a multi-million dollar payment by Perdue to the family of the deceased in an accident to drop any further litigation they had planned, but I think it was a woman who died in that accident so we may be talking about separate incidents. I’ll see if I can find a cite for it.
A 1989 story in the Washington Post confirmed that Perdue had received 34 convictions for traffic violations in 20 years, but had spaced them well enough that he never lost his license. Most were for speeding.
Later in 1975, after not being criminally indicted, Perdue was sued by the widow of the man Perdue had killed. I couldn’t find a settlement of that case. Maybe that’s the one.
That was not a criminal case, it was a civil suit that was dismissed after the parties settled. Happens all the time, even to people who are not Jacko.
Of course, in cases like this its usually traditional for the wealthy person to pay off not the government itself but some lower level officials, the wealthy person will then leave the country and retire to a beach in the Carribean.
The reason you usually can’t just pay the government not to execute you is that any government corrupt enough to accept the bribe is also corrupt enough to simply confiscate your money to begin with. The usual method is to charge the rich person with some crime, execute them, and confiscate their estate. Just taking the money without killing the person is risky, since they might try to get it back, leave the country, flee to France and form a monarchy in exile at the French court, or suchlike. No, better to kill him and just take the money, simpler all around.
In related news, convicted child porn enthusiast Gary Glitter, aka Paul Gadd, has apparently bought off the families of two Thai girls aged 11 and 12 whom he was accused of molesting and raping. The families have requested that the rape charges be withdrawn following payments of about $2,000 each. And what’s even more strange is that this filthy move wasn’t exposed as you might expect; no, Glitter’s lawyer is actually trumpeting this without even the decency to sound slightly sheepish. He thinks it’s just great that the witnesses can be bought, and happily says so to the international media. And the prosecutor agrees with him, saying that the payments will actually be taken into account as a mitigating factor in the trial. Bizarre.
Well, I’m sure that we can all rest more easily now that we know how it concluded.
(Martin Hyde seems to have called this one.)
Now that the closure information is posted, (apparently with a definitive “No” to the original question that never really got much traction), I think we’ll close this down.
