In China, It's Cheaper To Kill Than It Is To Maim

Slate has a story about hit-and-run crashes in China that proves that truth is usually stranger than fiction.

Geoffrey Sant, who teaches law at Fordham and is on the board of the New York Chinese Cultural Center, details a trend among Chinese drivers to kill the people they hit with their cars to keep from paying millions in medical costs over their lifetimes. Often, the drivers plead ignorance — that they thought it was a bag of trash, or a box — and rarely serve significant jail sentences.

Incidents captured on video show drivers sometimes backing over their victims several times to insure that they’ve been killed, according to the report.

The story details a disparity between restitution for people killed and injured in accidents, and often lax jail sentences for drivers convicted of hit-and-run fatal crashes. (In May, Indian actor Salman Khan was sentenced to only five years in jail for running over five people — killing one — while he was drunk. In 2012, a teen in Thailand was convicted of killing nine people and didn’t serve any jail time.)

Hitting and killing someone may only run $30,000-$50,000 in China, Sant writes. Paying that person’s medical bills for life could add up to millions.

“‘Double-hit cases’ have been around for decades. I first heard of the ‘hit-to-kill’ phenomenon in Taiwan in the mid-1990s when I was working there as an English teacher. A fellow teacher would drive us to classes. After one near-miss of a motorcyclist, he said, ‘If I hit someone, I’ll hit him again and make sure he’s dead.'”

The most chilling account recalls the case where a man struck a 3-year-old boy with the rear of his BMW X6, rolling over his head. The man pulls forward, over the boy again, and then gets out of the car to guide the car over the young boy again. The man pulled away from the scene — running over the boy for the fourth time — and was only charged with accidentally killing the boy.

In 2012, a 2-year-old girl named Wang Yue was struck by two vans in China and lay dying on the street for 7 minutes while 18 passersby walked past the mortally wounded girl. The driver of the van was only sentenced to 3 1/2 years in jail for his role in the killing.

Sant points out that not all drivers who hit people escape without penalties. A man who struck a woman on a bicycle, then returned to stab her to make sure she was dead, was convicted and executed. But those cases appear to be the exception and not the rule.

Yet even when a driver hits a victim multiple times, it can be hard to prove intent and causation — at least to the satisfaction of China’s courts. Judges, police, and media often seem to accept rather unbelievable claims that the drivers hit the victims multiple times accidentally, or that the drivers confused the victims with inanimate objects.