The Peter Humphrey/Yu Yingzeng case (again)

I last blogged about this case in August 2014, when Peter Humphrey and Yu Yingzeng were convicted and sentenced in Shanghai on charges of unlawful acquisition of personal information of citizens. I had some preliminary comments on the case based on the trial transcript and some quick-and-dirty research. I've now had the chance to do much more extensive research and to look at the text of the judgment as well, and have written up the results. They pretty much confirm my initial take: that this was a case of selective prosecution, and the sentences were out of line with cases with comparable facts. Humphrey was sentenced to 30 months' imprisonment; no previous defendant in any of Shanghai's 92 cases had ever gotten more than 24 months. (For those not following this story, Humphrey and Yu were recently released and have gone to the UK.)

The abstract is below; the full paper can be found here at the Social Science Research Network site.

The case of Peter Humphrey and Yu Yingzeng, convicted in China on August 2014 on charges of unlawful acquisition of citizens’ personal information, raises important issues about Chinese law. A narrow but important issue is how Chinese law draws the line between lawful and unlawful acquisition of information, a practice routinely carried out by businesses and individuals. This article examines the trial transcript and judgment in the Humphrey/Yu case and finds that it sheds regrettably little light on what remains a murky question. A broader issue is whether the Chinese legal system can be counted on to operate in a fair and impartial manner. This article presents the results of a study of all reported cases in Shanghai (ninety-two cases) involving the same provision of the Criminal Law that was the basis of the Humphrey/Yu conviction. It finds that the Humphrey/Yu sentences are outliers relative to other cases with comparable facts. In particular, Humphrey’s sentence of 30 months’ imprisonment was by far the heaviest sentence ever meted out by Shanghai courts, even though the circumstances seem conspicuously less serious than those of many other cases where lesser sentences were imposed.