Time for courts to apply same standards in similar cases

HEBEI DISTRICT PEOPLE’S COURT in North China’s Tianjin recently found a 51-year-old woman guilty of “possessing guns” and sentenced her to three and a half years in prison, even though her “guns” are usually considered toys. Days later, a county court in Central China’s Henan province was found to be publicly auctioning similar “guns” on its website. Southern Metropolis Daily comments:

The Tianjin court said they handed out the sentence because the Ministry of Public Security issued a document in 2008, which defined a gun as being able to fire a projectile with a muzzle energy exceeding 1.8 joule per square centimeter. According to that standard, six of the nine toy guns collected from the woman were identified as true guns.

There has been criticism of the standard, as some people claim it is too low because the gun’s muzzle energy can be exceeded when someone throws a piece of chalk, for instance. However, even if we put the challenges to the standard aside, a serious problem still exists.

Reports show the toy guns auctioned by the court in Henan are very possibly more powerful than the ones held by the woman, but the court insisted they were toy guns even though no one ever tested them.

Isn’t that a double standard?

The response from the court in Henan, that they were auctioning “toy guns”, shows the court staff are ignorant of the law. The law does not recognize “toy guns”; it only recognizes real guns and imitation guns according to their muzzle energy. By calling their auctioned items “toy guns”, they are trying to find excuses.

Further, where did the court in Henan obtain the toy guns for its auction? If it confiscated them from residents for “illegally holding them”, then its public auction is illegal, because it is trying to sell things that are illegal to buy.

Zhou Qiang, chief justice and president of the Supreme People’s Court, said last March that a main objective of the current judicial reform is to introduce the same standards for similar cases, so as to better protect social justice. We hope that principle can be applied.