Asia Pacific | The ‘Leniency’ Trap: How China’s Plea System Gives Prosecutors More Power
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The ‘Leniency’ Trap: How China’s Plea System Gives Prosecutors More Power
China has embraced a plea deal system, but lawyers and scholars fear that it is being abused to further erode individual rights — and for shakedowns.
The South Korean professional soccer player Son Jun-ho’s legal fight against match fixing and bribery charges in China has brought to light problems with that country’s plea agreement system. Credit… Anthony Wallace/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images March 3, 2025
When Son Jun-ho, a key midfielder for South Korea’s World Cup soccer team, signed with a Chinese club, he was an indication of China’s ambition to dominate the world’s most popular sport.
But after Chinese police officers detained him two years later, accusing him of bribery and match-fixing, he became a symbol of a different sort: the ruthless efficiency of China’s legal system.
Mr. Son had insisted to his interrogators that he was innocent. He asked for a lawyer, but the police told him, through a Korean translator, that one was unnecessary. The police threatened to bring his wife in and asked how his children would fare if both parents were detained.
After months in detention, he was offered a deal in which he was promised a lighter punishment in return for signing an admission of guilt. He took it.
It was a move he would later regret, saying that he had signed only under duress. “Fear overtook me, and without fully understanding the charges, I confessed, hoping to return to my family,” Mr. Son told reporters at a news conference in South Korea, fighting back tears. “It was a naïve mistake.”
The arrangement Mr. Son was offered, known as plea leniency in China, is a legal tactic that scholars say has further eroded the rights of the accused in a judicial system that has long been stacked against them.
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