A man from the southern city of Guangzhou, who was sentenced to
life imprisonment for taking large sums of cash from a
malfunctioning ATM, has appealed to a higher court in Guangdong
Province, a local newspaper reported on Wednesday.
Xu Ting, a 24-year-old migrant worker, has entered a plea of
innocent with the Guangdong provincial higher people's court
through his lawyers, Yang Zhenping and Wu Yichun, New Express
Daily reported.
The lawyers said the case was not one of theft or embezzlement,
because Xu should not be blamed for taking money from an ATM that
had technical problems. "What Xu has done violates the civil law,
not the criminal law," the lawyers' petition for appeal stated.
In April 2006, when Xu Ting was withdrawing cash from the ATM,
he realized that the ATM deducted only 1 yuan from his account for
every 1,000 yuan withdrawn. He told this to a friend surnamed
Guo.
Xu subsequently withdrew 175,000 yuan (24,000 U.S. dollars) in
171 transactions while Guo withdrew 18,000 yuan.
Guo was jailed for a year after turning himself in but Xu
remained on the run for a year before being apprehended and
sentenced to life for theft.
Under the current criminal law, theft of more than 100,000 yuan
from financial organizations carries a life sentence. If the theft
involved people, the punishment would be relatively lighter -- only
decades.
After Xu got his life sentence in late December, nationwide
debate broke out.
"They just took advantage of the malfunctioning ATM, not to bilk
or steal from it. It is too harsh to sentence a man to life
imprisonment for unexpectedly discovering an ATM's malfunction and
being enticed into committing a crime," the Beijing News
said in an editorial.
"Undoubtedly, Xu violated the law, but the debate focused on how
the local court arrived at its final judgment. One question was
whether the ATM can be considered as a financial organization, and
the other is the present criminal law has an obvious flaw regarding
punishment," said He Weifang, professor with Peking University in
Beijing.
According to the New Express Daily's report, eight
lawyers across the country have proposed a revision of the law to
the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress and also
the Supreme People's Court.
"The case deserves great attention, but if it calls for the
revision of law, it has a long way to go," said Hu Fuchuan, a local
lawyer.
(Xinhua News Agency January 10, 2008)