BEIJING, China — Neighbors didn’t even hear the shots that killed Judge Ma Caiyun. They came from a modified ball-bearing gun, wielded by one of two men who broke into the judge’s house, then fled in panic, firing at both Ma and her husband as they chased the intruders.
Ma, 38, was hit in both the stomach and face and died at the hospital. Her husband, a court officer, was saved by his belt buckle, according to a Beijing news report. The attackers — one of whom knew Ma from court, where she had recently ruled on his divorce settlement — killed themselves after a police chase.
Ma’s murder has sent shockwaves through the Chinese legal community and again cast question on President Xi Jinping’s promise to strengthen the rule of law in China.
It’s not just that the slaying took place late at night in a quiet residential suburb of China’s famously safe capital. Nor that it occurred just days before Lianghui, or “Two Sessions,” the Communist Party’s annual gathering of its rubber-stamp parliament, when security is so tight that simply accessing overseas websites becomes a painful chore.
The tragedy has come at a time of intensely low morale for the legal profession. In the last year, rights lawyers have been arrested and forced to make televised confessions for crimes they haven’t been charged with. A proposed law that threatens to criminalize any conduct deemed “disruptive” to courtroom order has further cowed those seeking to defend clients from politically charged prosecution.
The dramatic killing of a respected district judge seems to drive another nail into the coffin of a legal system already beset with strife.
Many judges now live in fear of such personal attacks, which have become frequent and sometimes fatal in recent years. In a single month in 2010, a trio of judges were killed by a gunman in Hunan province and another two were attacked with sulfuric acid in Guangxi province. Last year, four judges were stabbed in a courthouse in Hubei. In 2006, a man detonated a suicide bomb at a Gansu county court, killing himself and four others.
In each of these incidents, the perpetrator has been someone seeking extrajudicial redress. The gunman in the Hunan case, for example, specifically mentioned his dissatisfaction with the outcome of a legal dispute in a letter he left behind (he, too, committed suicide after his rampage).
In Ma’s case, the principal attacker was enraged by the division of property in his divorce and had bludgeoned his ex-wife’s husband to death earlier that evening.
