Death penalty upheld for gang leader in rape cases

Twenty-one years after being sentenced to death for rapes and other crimes, Sun Xiaoguo had his death penalty upheld by the Yunnan High People's Court on Dec 23. The court said he had been given an improper early release from prison and sentence reduction.

In 1998, Sun, then 21, was sentenced to death by the Kunming Intermediate People's Court in Yunnan for rape, intentional injury, insulting women and disturbing public order. But the sentence was reduced to death with a two-year reprieve by the Yunnan High People's Court in 1999, and in 2007 was then further cut to 20 years in prison.

Sun was freed in April 2010 after serving 12 years and five months in prison in what courts later called a miscarriage of justice.

In October, the high people's court began reconsidering Sun's 1998 case after a series of investigations, reviews of files and materials and visits to people involved in the case suggested the law was wrongly applied in its previous rulings.

On Monday, the court confirmed the wrongful application of the law, saying the judicial misconduct had to be corrected and the original conviction and sentence given by the lower court upheld.

The high people's court released some details about Sun's offenses in the late 1990s after the latest decision. It found Sun raped four girls, including one under the age of 14, between April and June 1997.

In November of that year, Sun seized two 17-year-old girls in public places and violently assaulted them, seriously injuring one of them, the court found. In July and October 1997, Sun also disturbed public order and assaulted and injured three other people, the court said.

"Sun ignored the law, offended several times with extremely cruel means, and his behavior brought great damage to society," the court said. "The ruling made by the intermediate people's court should be kept, as the conviction was correct and the death sentence was reasonable."

The court also had discovered that Sun had been sentenced to three years in prison for rape in 1995 by a different court in the province, but he served only about eight months of the prison term.

Sun's record after being freed in 2010 also caught up with him. During the rehearing by the high people's court, the Yuxi Intermediate People's Court sentenced Sun to 25 years in prison for organized crimes committed between 2013 and 2018.

Considering Sun's multiple crimes in 1998, not serving his complete sentence in 1995 and crimes after leaving prison in 2010, the high people's court combined the punishments and sentenced him to death. The court also ordered that his private property be confiscated.

Sun attracted national attention in April when a Yunnan media outlet reported that several gangs, including one led by Sun, had been broken up during a crackdown on organized crime in Kunming, the capital of Yunnan province.

His case triggered widespread concern over corruption in the provincial judicial and prison systems, as follow-up stories showed that Sun had escaped the death sentence handed down in 1998 after he was found guilty of multiple criminal charges and had been living as a free man.

The high people's court said, "Sun has not received the punishment he deserves for his frequent offenses over the past 20 years, and judicial corruption in his case also challenged the bottom line of the public and the law.

An investigation this year found judicial corruption that led to convictions of 19 people, including Sun's parents.

"We'll learn a lesson from Sun's case and increase supervision in dealing with cases to improve the quality of our hearings and further uphold justice," the court said.

Under China's Criminal Procedure Law, a death sentence handed down by a lower court must now be submitted to the Supreme People's Court, the country's top court, for review. The sentence can be carried out after it is approved by the top court.