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China Says Serious Polluters Will Get the Death Penalty
formaggio writes "According to the Xinhua News Agency, the Chinese government is now allowing courts to punish those who commit environment crimes with the death penalty. The new judicial interpretation comes in the wake of several serious environmental problems that have hit the country over the last few months, including dangerous levels of air pollution, a river full of dead pigs, and other development projects that have imperiled public health."
[nt]
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Boy, I sure hope they catch and kill the worst pollution offender in the entire country: the Chinese government.
In Communist China, pollution kills you (literally)!
I don't know. If you have the death penalty I can see pollution being a worthy offense. If you dump toxic waste into the drinking water and dozens get sick and die of cancer-- how is that any different from murder.
Good for China. Here in the US we would just fine them a few million... they would shift their assets to a sub division... sell that to themselves and declare bankruptcy without paying a dime. Then keep on doing what they were doing until they got caught the next time.
This isn't saying you are executed for littering. This looks to be establishing the maximal punishment.
Think more along the lines of "knowingly poisoning hundreds of thousands of people."
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
The Chinese can't even effectively fine polluters and now there's talk of capital punishment for polluting? What next? Decimate school children when their class average isn't up to par because the instructor's scolding has no effect?
There are several key problems here that are the real underlying problems: 1) the Chinese government is not unified in their vision of the environment and I'm talking differences spanning across provincial & federal levels as well as between federal ministries. 2) they collectively refuse to accept that their abuse of natural resources is part of their winning equation against other capitalist nation states and, as a consequence, no one can talk about how this will hurt their bottom line even though several parts of the government realize it (we pay them to import our pollution). 3) there is widespread corruption at all levels which is why fining is ineffective -- it's so bad that I'm sure if capital punishment is meted out, it will be given to the fork lift operator who dumped those pig carcasses in the river after his supervisor told him to "make them disappear or you'll disappear." No one up the chain will be held accountable and if they are, they need only grease some local wheels and they can consider themselves shielded.
It's disgusting and it's why I tell people where they can shove it when they complain that the EPA is destroying jobs. It's not perfect but we have to cling to things that kind of work when so many other "solutions" are abysmal failures.
The Chinese government is threatening to kill polluters but they can't see that they're part of and dependent on and benefiting from a system of habitual polluting. Increasing the impact of the punishment is a poor and maybe even more detrimental substitution for actually bringing to justice the true criminals up and down their ranks.
My work here is dung.
Nah, this will be reserved for people who do not have sufficient political connections...or more likely for people who fall out of favor with the political powers that be.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
That scenario really isn't different from murder. In the US you could be tried for second degree murder for something like that.
...off with your head!
Seriously, China? WTF. Going back to medieval values here? Executing people for pollution?
They should be punished, but death is a bit much.
Yeah, the death penalty should be reserved for angry guys who stab one person with a knife. The civilised punishment for poisoning the water drunk by thousands of people is a slap on the wrist and a fine that looks large to newpaper readers but causes no material harm to the perpetrator....
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
If you accept the legitimacy of the death penalty(obviously, if you don't, that's another story, and you aren't likely to approve of it for this purpose, or any other) serious pollution is actually highly logical:
The death penalty is usually assessed in cases of murder(esp. premeditated) or grievous bodily harm(especially premeditated or particularly gruesome in some way).
Well, guess what? Serious pollution is usually called 'serious' because it does, albeit at some epidemiological remove, cause some mixture of death and serious chronic health impairment, sometimes also nasty birth defects and the like.
It doesn't have the emotional punch of a nice juicy murder or a photogenic teenager getting raped or something; but pollution is a totally logical thing to punish by death(if you accept the traditional uses of the death penalty). Probably even better, in fact, because polluters are highly likely to be committing their crimes out of pure greed, not out of fear, passion, or other possible-to-rehabilitate/unlikely to reoffend motive.
Even if that were true, this law is 100% effective at preventing repeat offenders.
I seriously doubt it will be implemented against any company or person that is sufficiently connected to the PRC government - this list would include pretty much every existing big company HQ'd in China.
Now potential competitors to the aforementioned companies, and anyone who the PRC government doesn't like? Oh hell yes it'll be implemented - even if the offender has to get a little governmental 'assistance' in generating pollution sufficient to warrant execution.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Whoever you feel like. Including the fellow who happens to have not been involved, but can't pull the strings to get out.
I second this. I spend a good portion of graduate school in Beijing and Manchuria, and you hit the nail on the head. The only people who will pay the price for pollution are the dumb schmucks whose guanxi is not powerful enough to shield them from scapegoating.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
Holy bad example, Batman! A guy who robs a liquor store for $100 doesn't get 20 years for stealing $100. He gets 20 years for pointing a gun at the liquor store attendant and threatening his life for personal gain. Possibly as a repeat offender.
What a lot of commenters don't seem to get is that the sort of pollution that hardcore offenders engage in over there often results in human deaths. So the potential for punishment is merely being brought in line with the crime. You won't deter serious polluters with a fine.
That said, sure, many crimes are not proportional to their sentences. No news here. While we're making improbable demands, i think the act of spitting chewing gum on the street or sidewalk should be treated as vandalism, and enforced accordingly.
Well, I can only speak for myself. If I were executed for a crime, I would definitely think twice before committing that crime again. It's just not worth it.
A prison sentence is sufficient. With a bread and water diet.
Guess where we got the water.
Have gnu, will travel.
I don't know. If you have the death penalty I can see pollution being a worthy offense.
So who do you execute, then? The entire board of directors, the guy(s) that did it directly, or all of them?
Start with the lawyers.
Be seeing you...
There is no almost certain chance it will never actually happen. Over 3/4 of people sentenced to death row are actually executed eventually. Most criminals newly arrived on death row rate their chances of eventually being executed at less than 1%, despite the actually figures.
The typical person who gets the death penalty in the US has great difficulty imagining they will still be the same person in six months, let alone 20 years. More than a third of them can't pass the tests used to see if fifth graders are learning to project long term consequences as far as the month level. A t least half typically have little to no ability to empathize with anyone not very like them in race, gender, age, and even accent. By some studies, up to 60% of them have a mental health history involving incidents of psychosis. By others, over half were abusing a psychoactive drug at the time of the offense.
If you want to deter them with the death penalty, you need the time from the actual comission of a crime to execution, to be less than two weeks, with all appeals. You need to show them somebody sufficiently like them being executed, within two weeks of the time they consider a death penalty crime of their own, and what you show them needs to be substantially for the same crime, as in, they won't shoot the clerk at the all night gas station, if they have seen a man who looks like them shoot a victim who looks like that clerk,in a similar setting, at night, for similar reasons, and then be given the death penalty for it. Show them a realistic dramatization of the crime and follow it immediately with showing the actual execution, and you have a good chance of deterring them from committing that particular style of crime for a few weeks to a few months. show them something with differences, including ones you probably think should make no difference, and that chance drops.
I don't really want to live in a nation where we have to televise 10 executions a week to cover all the possible combinations, and always sentence somebody within a week of the crime so that we have a week to squeeze in the appeals and actual execution. I don't think that's a workable deterrent. Considering that the time for deterrence basically is between the crime and the execution, not from arrest to execution, deterrence sounds like it just can't work with the typical subject.
A good starting source: http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/documents/CunninghamDeathRowReview.pdf
For the mental ability assessment and mental state portions, try starting about page 198.
Who is John Cabal?