Former Chinese Supreme Court Justice Huang Songyou, 52, has been sentenced to life imprisonment for corruption after being convicted of taking more than 3.9 million yuan ($570,000) in bribes from four lawyers in return for favorable rulings. He was also convicted of embezzling 1.2 million yuan of government funds in 1997 when he was president of a city-level court in Guang-dong Province.
What is fascinating about the story below is that part of the sentence is to strip Huang “of his political rights for life, and all of his properties were confiscated.” I suppose with life imprisonment that will not matter much but political rights are treated as sentencing items in China — despite the relatively few rights afforded to citizens in comparison to the West.
The Court has 13 “grand justices” and is the highest judicial body in China.
Four other judges are implicated in the scandal.
For the full story, click here.
this is an interesting article from the Harvard Business Review on Google and China:
http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2010/01/why_is_google_doing_government.html
Talk about a lifetime appointment.
Sounds like a fair sentence if one of the top judges in the land is corrupt. I wouldn’t take away his political rights, but a life sentence is fair.
I wonder what, if any, sentence a US Supreme Court justice would receive for similar crimes?
And who decides just what constitutes “good Behavior” for a Supreme Court justice?
Doesn’t he have any harvestable parts? What’s happened to China now?
I think they’re treated as a separate issues everywhere except in Common Law systems, where the loss of political rights is rolled into every felony conviction by default.
Political rights as sentences? How about voting rights for (former) felons?
I’ve heard it said that a right is what can’t be taken away. So much for the “right to vote.” Seems more like a privilege.
We need to have a “zero tolerance” policy on corruption for state and federal judges.
I bet his favorite song right now is Not, I’ll sing this sing for you. But
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