Is it fair to support lawless lawyers?
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E-mail Xinhua, July 14, 2015
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File photo of Zhou Shifeng, attorney and director of Beijing Fengrui Law Firm, which was suspected of making profits by illegally hiring protesters in an attempt to influence court decisions. |
Lawyers are a respectable group, expected to be loyal to the law and uphold social fairness. So what happens when they are suspected of breaking the law themselves and disturbing social order?
Police officer Li Lebin shot dead Xu Chunhe in May at Qing'an County Railway Station after Xu attacked Li several times and multiple warnings went unheeded. An investigation showed that Li opened fire entirely in accordance with the law.
But some lawyers spread rumors that "Li opened fire on the orders of an official because Xu was a petitioner." A group of so-called "petitioners" were then hired to shout slogans and raise defiant signs in support the lawyers' spurious claims.
By turning such a matter -- a tragedy indeed, in the eyes of many -- into a hot issue, even a political one, those paragons of legal virtue got exactly what they wanted: celebrity and money.
When the police detained the lawyers who initiated this sordid chain of events, they were faced by the absurd spectacle of western media loudly supporting these stalwart "defenders of human rights" who seem to be nothing more than self-serving self-publicists with nothing at heart but their own fame.
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