Mother circulates death penalty petition amid public outcry

The death of a 24-year-old Chinese woman, who was stabbed by the ex-boyfriend of her roommate in Japan last year, still brings pain to many Chinese who have signed a petition calling for the death penalty ahead of his trial next month.

The suspect, Chen Shifeng, is scheduled to stand trial on December 11 in Tokyo for murdering Chinese student Jiang Ge, on November 3, 2016, Jiang’s mother wrote on her Sina Weibo account.

Jiang’s mother wrote that Chen stabbed her daughter to death just outside the door of her rental apartment, while Liu Xin, Jiang’s roommate and Chen’s ex-girlfriend, kept the door closed when the incident happened in the evening.

The reason for the stabbing remains unknown, with some speculating that Chen stabbed Jiang as the girl outside the door refused to let him enter the house to talk to Liu. However, Liu said that she had no idea about what happened outside.

The case attracted a lot of attention after the Chinese media’s report in November 2016. The attention was heightened when people saw Liu showing off her cozy life on social media and ignoring requests from Jiang’s mother for evidence.

Liu would neither apologize nor comfort Jiang’s family after the case got underway and she threatened not to help the police investigation after Jiang’s mother criticized her in public, according to Weibo posts of Jiang’s mother, Jiang Qiulian.

A related hashtag, “Chinese student murdered in Japan,” had gotten more than 1.9 billion hits as of press time on Sina Weibo, with an increasing number of comments about Chen’s behavior.

Jiang Qiulian began a drive to collect signatures for an online petition to call for the death penalty for Chen, in August, and managed to get more than 180,000 people within 30 hours.

“We understand that people rarely get the death sentence in Japan, but we believe that this is one of the most heinous crimes, the brutal murder of an innocent girl because of a personal grudge with someone else. The suspect, Chen Shifeng, also showed no remorse after leaving the victim’s family in pieces,” the petition stated.

Jiang is also trying to get the Japanese to sign the petition in Tokyo ahead of Chen’s trial, but she did not say how many signatures she had managed to collect.

Liu denied all the things the mother had blamed her for, on Sina Weibo, and claimed that netizens were “inciting the public” and that she couldn’t reveal any details of the case because she was assisting the police with the investigation.