Procedural Justice? Yang Jia's Death Penalty

Cop killer Yang Jia （杨佳）was sentenced to death today. The report from Xinhua says:

'The court ruled Yang had perfect capacity for criminal responsibility according to a forensic psychiatric assessment conducted by a qualified and specialized institute entrusted by the police. But it didn't give a specific name.'

The sentence has received questions on the procedural justice. Xinhua's report doesn't specify the name of the institute that is responsible for Yang Jia's mental illness evaluation. On whether or not this institute has judicial testimony qualifications, lawyer Liu Xiaoyuan （刘晓源）comments in his blog that the procuratorate or the court may not re-do the qualified psychiatric testimony on Yang Jia.

The first psychiatric assessment is conducted by the Ministry of Justice's Science and Technology Research Institute (MJSTRI), and the report says 'Yang was confirmed to be of a sane mind after a judicial appraisal following the attack'. According to Mr. Liu Xiaoyuan, MJSTRI is actually not qualified institute to conduct such an expert testimony.

The death sentence is the result of the first trial, and Yang Jia now has seven days to appeal to the Shanghai People's Higher Court. If the verdict is still the capital punishment, then the case will step into the review procedure at the People's Supreme Court.

Yang Jia attacked nine cops on the 1st of July and six of them died. The sensational case immediately stirred up all sorts of speculations on how and why he went into such an extreme. Yet in just two months, his death sentence is convicted. The handling of this case by the law enforcement and judicial system in China is obviously quite fast. Because of the Olympic Games, the trial actually was postponed at the end of July.

Although the verdict of the first trial is not a surprise to many observers, the judicial procedure in handling this case has become the focus of the public attention. Some people have questioned about the transparency of the trial as the public gallery of the court was fully booked by Shanghai PSB yesterday, so basically there was no media staff inside the court to witness the trial.

While Chinese legal tradition has emphasized on the substantive justice, some procedural rules are not strictly followed or even violated by the courts. The pressure for a judge's conduct to show procedural justice has slowly been piled up from the public opinion side. Yang Jia's case will be the latest one to testify to what extent the procedural justice has been realized in Chinese judicial system.

Postscript:

Yang jia was executed on 26/11/2008. Here's Ap report for the record.