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LadyEllen -> bipolar man executed in China (12/29/2009 1:29:12 PM)
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The British guy I mentioned last week on one of the threads here was executed by the Chinese authorities last night.
Its really quite sad. He'd been a successful businessman in the UK until a few years ago and then (in the best tradition of mental illness euphemism) he lost it, totally. Diagnosed with bipolar disorder he left home and turned up in Poland, homeless, before somehow travelling eastern Europe into Asia, apparently on a mission to bring peace to Earth, convinced he was the man for the job, and running into organised criminals for whom he was an easy target.
In 2007 he was arrested in China for smuggling drugs, a trip he'd been talked into by criminals in his suggestible state by all accounts. He'd have been executed there and then but for his British passport.
But he was convicted, despite his obvious mental illness and sentenced to death as is the law in China. Despite the repeated protestations of the UK government - which has fractured relations with China, who are not best pleased - that an ill man ought not be executed, the sentence was enacted last night.
For me, the Chinese are right - no one else has the right to interfere with their judicial process and if death is the penalty for drug smuggling, then that is that. But we are also right - it is plainly wrong to hold a mentally ill man to the same standards as those free of such a condition, and he ought not have been executed.
E
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