Loopholes make hit-and-run 'best option'
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Yao Jiaxin is waiting to be sentenced by the courts. It's hardly believable that this timid-looking, tearful young man could be a cruel, merciless killer.
On the night of October 20, 2010, Yao, a then 21-year-old student at the Xi'an Conservatory of Music, hit a ordinary woman, Zhang Miao, who was cycling home.
Instead of helping Zhang, he fatally stabbed her six times in the chest before fleeing the scene and he was not caught until one month later when the police were closing in and his family turned him in.
Asked what possessed him to turn a traffic accident into a homicide, the fresh-faced boy said when he saw the injured woman struggling to remember the plate number of his car, he lost his mind and killed her, fearing she would badger him for compensation.
In the eyes of his schoolmates and neighbors, Yao was reportedly a quiet and introverted boy from a well-off family who did well in his studies. His father was strict with him, expecting him to excel in every aspect, while his mother doted on him.
Most people are perplexed by the unexplainable combination of an innocent boy and a hideous demon. His attorney knows how to play on this sharp contrast. He has argued that the defendant committed "a crime of passion," which deserves a more lenient punishment.
Soaring numbers of motor vehicles in China have given rise to huge numbers of traffic accident cases.
In 2010, China saw more deaths on the roads than any other nation. According to the statistics released by the Ministry of Public Security, 67,759 people were killed and 275,125 injured in 238,351 traffic accidents across the country. Ten times as many people are killed for every mile driven in China than in the US.
More alarmingly, hit-and-run cases have been on the rise, and some involve de facto homicide. Stabbing the victim to death as Yao did may be rare, but there were reports about drivers who, when they discover they've merely wounded the person they hit, deliberately run over their victims again to kill them, or dump them in a deserted spot to die.
They do this because they believe that the existing laws and regulations mean less trouble for those who hit and run, or even a killer like Yao, than for a driver who turned himself in after the accident.
On May 1, 2004, new regulations governing compensation for personal injuries came into effect in China. While the new regulations substantially raise the compensation for the victims of traffic accidents in favor of the victims, killing a person in a traffic accident can only result in no more than three years in jail.
