Death Penalty for a Ghost in China
Copyright© 2020 by Kim Cancer
Chapter 14
十四
I went back to my apartment, swallowed a handful of Xanax. I had been upping my dose weekly for them to be efficacious. While I waited for them to kick in, I lay back in bed, scooped my phone up into my hands, stared down at it like a palm reader and read and explored more about the death penalty in China.
China doesn’t release official statistics regarding the number of death sentences that are carried out, so it’s hard to know how many were executed per year. Being an American, I like to know death tolls, helps me to put things in perspective, I think...
I opened my laptop, found it was already on and online, and playing a news report from an Australian TV channel. The report said there’s over 2000 executions per year in China and that the State will carry out the execution in 2 or 3 years, offering the convicted only one appeal.
Sometimes the execution will be done faster if it’s a particularly heinous, famous case, and like Jim was saying, they usually carry out the death penalty by firing squad, but many are also done these days by lethal injection.
I heard a voice, a female voice, speak to me from the distance. It was speaking in Chinese, but I understood its words in English; it said, “The soldiers shoot them in the head and then send their family a bill for the bullet. It’s called the ‘Bullet Fee,’ and ranges anywhere from 5 cents to $4.”
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