Journalists and Jail Time

September 22, 2010

China isn’t the only country where reporters go to jail.

In September 2006, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that two Chronicle reporters were sent to prison for as long as a year and a half for not revealing their sources.

In July 2005, Judith Miller, a Pulitzer Prize winning American journalist, who worked for the New York Times at the time, was jailed for contempt of court for refusing to testify before a federal grand jury.

In fact, the First Amendment Center has a list of U.S. reporters who have gone to jail. 

The first case was in 1848 when a Senate committee confined John Nugent, a correspondent for the New York Herald.


An example of how one law is different around the world.

Then between 1848 and 1897, there were five more cases.

Starting in 1911 and through the 20th century, the “free” press in America had more than 30 collisions with the law.  

I stopped counting at thirty.

When I started to research the China side of this topic, I learned that Yahoo’s Hong Kong office helped China catch journalist Shi Tao for “divulging state secrets”.  Shi Tao was sentenced to 10 years in prison. Source: BBC

In fact, The Committee to Protect Journalists reported that in 2008, 125 journalists went to prison around the globe. Twenty-eight were in China.

 China’s laws and sentences tend to be longer and harsher, but China does not have America’s legal system or Constitution, which were designed to protect American citizens from the government and criminals in the U.S. – not China.

Every country has different penalties for crimes.  For example, what is the worst that could happen if you were caught in Turkey with illegal drugs?  Up to 20 years in prison.

However, in Singapore and Thailand, there is a death penalty for this crime. Source: Drug laws abroad

See Growing China’s Legal System

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. 

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Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

The Human Rights of Individualism

September 3, 2010

The Guardian.co.uk reported that China moves to reduce number of crimes punishable by death.  Considering that in 1980, China had no legal system much has been accomplished and more is yet to come.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gV6OoypZMco 

I agree that some of the crimes that warrant the death penalty in China are unfair for the crime committed, but China is not a Western country and the history of China prior to Communism shows that convicted criminals were often executed for a long list of nonviolent crimes.

Call me an Old Testament man. I believe if someone is convicted with overwhelming evidence of a brutal crime, he or she should face punishment equal to or worse than the crime they committed.

A trial for first-degree murder should end in a swift execution.

Face it, there are convicted criminals who cannot be allowed out of prison. Instead of locking them up for decades at a high cost to honest hardworking taxpayers, the criminals should be executed.

The Preamble to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights says, “Recognition of inherent dignity and the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice, and peace in the world.”  Source: Human Rights Here and Now

I disagree with the term “all members” of the human family. Some criminals forfeit that right due to the nature of his or her crimes.

In forty-six American states and the District of Columbia, convicted criminal offenders are denied the right to vote while serving a sentence in prison. Thirty-nine states also disenfranchise felons on parole and twenty-nine disenfranchise those on probation.

In fourteen states, even ex-offenders who have served their sentences remain barred for life from voting. Source: The Sentencing Project

However, there is pressure on the United States to go easier on ex-offenders and allow them to have the right to vote again.

In fact, almost every country is changing due to pressure from human rights groups.  I don’t oppose what the human rights groups are doing yet slavery didn’t end during the American Civil War. Why isn’t more being done to end slavery?

Today, more than 27 million men, women and children endure brutal working conditions for no money and under the constant threat of beatings, torture and rape. Source: iAbolish.org

All a slaver has to do is make sure he or she lives in a country that, at worst, will lock him or her up for life and provide free shelter, free food and free medical—something that China doesn’t do for these types of crimes.

Do you believe pampering hard-core criminals is going to change them? Maybe theWest should consider what “human rights” looks like in a collective culture as opposed to individualism.

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. 

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5 Comments | America, China, Chinese Culture, Chinese history, crime, cultural differences | Tagged: , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

The Real Police State (1/4)

August 9, 2010

China is a culture that has never gone easy on convicted criminals. When I was researching 19th Century China for Robert Hart’s Concubine Saga, there was an incident in Canton that Hart wrote about where the Chinese Imperial government had fifty Chinese randomly selected from a street near a gate where rebels had broken into the city. 

Those fifty were beheaded without a trial to show others what would happen if a similar incident took place. The heads were put in cages where the people could see them as a reminder.

More than a century later, the BBC and Wondering China reported that China’s highest law-making body would debate a draft amendment to criminal law soon to reduce the number of crimes that carry the death penalty.

A brief history of China’s legal system shows that when Mao died, there was no legal system in place at the time. In the 1980s, during the infancy of China’s legal system, the lower courts could apply the death penalty, but the numbers executed caused Westerners to protest the inhumanity of such acts.

As a result, in 2007, the law changed and death sentences had to be reviewed by a higher court before gaining approval.  Without giving the exact numbers, the Chinese report that the number of executions is down.

See China Law and Justice System

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. 

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Far from the Facts

June 29, 2010

Due to a China Law Blog post, I spent the better part of an hour hunting for a quote from Sir Robert Hart where he compares China and England’s legal systems in the 19th century. In the quote, which I couldn’t find, Hart points out that the British and Chinese legal systems differ because of culture—one is based on the individual and China’s is not.

Robert Hart's statue in Shanghai (1913 - 1942)

In I Wish All China Could be California Girls, Dan Harris (China Law Blog) mentions a post I wrote, Belching for China, and then he takes the topic further. Harris writes, “I agree with iLooks overall premise, but I am not so sure Hindrey’s article is the right one on which to go off, because it is neither simplistic nor jingoistic…”

To make his point, Harris provides better evidence written by a personal Injury lawyer, William Marler, who feels that China needs a few good lawyers and a legal product liabilty system similar to the US.

That is the last thing China needs. In my “opinion” many of America’s problems stem from a lottery ticket mentality and bumper stickers saying, “Go Ahead and Hit Me and Make My Day.”

Marler writes that executing a top food-safety official in China for taking bribes is not the way to solve problems in food safety. What Marler doesn’t understand is that removing a rotten egg from the carton is sending a message to the Chinese and they get it. The Chinese have punished convicted criminals like this for more than two thousand years—far longer than any Western culture. In fact, today’s China is far less brutal since 1976.

To strengthen his point, Harris uses evidence from Stan Abrams at China Hearsay, another lawyer who chastises Marler for getting his facts wrong.  

What I learned from Harris and Abrams was that people like Marler and Hindrey and their stereotypical “opinions” about China are examples of what many in America believe, which is usually far from the truth.

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Lloyd Lofthouse,
Award winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. 

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