The Non-Violent Resistance blog (link) summarizes and comments on an article on Sina.com about the murder of a Beijing University student:
From the looks of it, this story has the potential of blowing into another huge judicial scandal. The facts are pretty straight — a real bad-ass student at the Medical School of Peking University — with a long rap sheet including verbal and physical violence against classmates, harrassing female students, etc, just makes you wonder why such a monster hadn’t been kicked out of the most prestigious university in the country — commits the ultimate crime in June last year, stabbing a fellow student more than 80 times, killing him in a after-class fight over the latter’s girlfriend, whom An had harrassed on multiple occasions.
The story has never quite dropped from public scrutiny partly because of the prestige of the university, partly because of its bloody nature.
But the verdict of the trial shocked many. An Ran, the murderer, was convicted and given a death sentence — with a two-year reprieve. That basically means a life sentence. Commentators on Sina seem to be overwhelmingly outraged as to how An Ran could escape death. Given the circumstances of the case, the Chinese society’s “blood-for-blood” sense of justice, and judgements in similar criminal cases, a death sentence would have looked certain.
The story says that An’s family paid the victim’s family, who’re from the countryside in He Nan province, 400,000 yuan in compensation to settle a civil suit attached to the murder case.
