Hello, I'm Zhan Qingyun.

After last week's bonus episode about my reflections on the Yingying Zhang case, some people asked why I did not also discuss Zhang Koukou. Professor Xu had already covered it, and I genuinely felt that this case was even harder to discuss.

We followed and debated the Zhang Koukou case for a long time, but much of that debate relied on incomplete evidence and facts. None of us knows exactly what happened twenty-two years earlier, and our views are also shaped by different attitudes toward justice and revenge.

Legally, I think most of us can agree that what he did was legally unforgivable yet emotionally understandable. Under China's current law and system of capital punishment, his death sentence was foreseeable.

Yet none of us can answer what we would have done if placed within Zhang Koukou's life experience.

Some suggested that instead of taking private revenge, Zhang should have studied law, become a lawyer, and sought to overturn the judgment concerning his mother.

There is nothing wrong with that suggestion. I saw it highly upvoted on Weibo, and of course we should try to resolve problems through law. Yet the suggestion also feels profoundly sad.

Justice and a fair trial are things everyone deserves; they should not be luxuries available only to lawyers.

If a society assumes that overturning a case and obtaining a fair trial require striving to become a lawyer or judge, perhaps even lawyers and judges can do little. We should not simply believe either side's account. We can only accept the court's final finding that the trial twenty-two years earlier was sound: a minor negligently caused a death during a fight, and neither side objected to the result at the time.

Even so, witnessing his mother's death left a shadow in a young boy's mind, and no one tried to understand, comfort, or help him resolve it. There was much more society could have done.

Some asked whether Zhang Koukou would have received the death penalty had the case occurred in the United States.

I initially thought this could not be answered as a rigorous legal question, because every country's law rests on its culture and stage of social development. We cannot simply transplant the case to America.