Chinese Court Sentences Lao Rongzhi to Death for Seven Deaths in Crimes With Fa Ziying
A Nanchang court found Lao Rongzhi guilty of murder, robbery and kidnapping in four cities from 1996 to 1999. She wept, rejected the verdict and appealed.
Published
Lao Rongzhi wept when the presiding judge read out the word death. At 9 a.m. on Thursday, September 9, 2021, the Nanchang Intermediate People's Court in Jiangxi province found her guilty of intentional homicide, robbery and kidnapping, crimes committed more than two decades earlier with her lover, Fa Ziying. It sentenced her to death, stripped her of her political rights for life and ordered all her personal property confiscated. She told the court she did not accept the verdict and would appeal.
The court found that between 1996 and 1999 the couple had planned their crimes together and split the work. Lao took jobs as a hostess in entertainment venues and picked out the targets; Fa used the violence. Together they committed four crimes of robbery, kidnapping and murder, one in each of four cities: Nanchang in Jiangxi, Wenzhou in Zhejiang, Changzhou in Jiangsu and Hefei in Anhui. The court held her responsible for five deaths by intentional homicide, one death in a robbery that included breaking into a home, and one death in a kidnapping in which more than 70,000 yuan was demanded as ransom.
Fa was caught and executed in 1999. Lao vanished. She lived under false names, among them "Xueli," until police arrested her in Xiamen in November 2019, twenty years after the last of the killings. She was born in 1974 and had once taught primary school in Jiujiang.
At her trial in December 2020 she had told the court that Fa forced her, and that she had never agreed with him to kill anyone. The judges rejected that. They found she had played a principal role and must be punished for every crime she took part in. After her arrest she had given a truthful account of the kidnapping in Changzhou, the court said, but that was not enough to lighten the sentence.
Her lawyers had not disputed the robberies or the kidnappings. They argued that the evidence did not prove she caused anyone's death. Much of what the prosecution put before the court consisted of Lao's own statements, the statements Fa gave before his execution, witness accounts and physical evidence from the time. None of the biological evidence shown at trial pointed directly to Lao as a killer, and some of the physical evidence had been lost over the years. In its judgment the court explained that the original case materials had been held by the court in Hefei, that it had obtained and copied all of them, and that it had accounted for each item that no longer existed.
The court also ruled on a civil claim brought by Zhu Dahong. It ordered Lao to pay her a little more than 48,000 yuan, far short of the 1.35 million yuan she had sought. Zhu said in court that she would not appeal.
Lao began to give her reasons for appealing on the spot. What she had done, she said, was never what she wanted, and it did not fit the person she had been as a teacher. Then her voice broke. Her mind was confused, she told the court, and she would set out her appeal in writing.
What came later. The Jiangxi Provincial High People's Court heard Lao's appeal from August 18 to 20, 2022, and on November 30, 2022, rejected it and upheld the death sentence. China's Supreme People's Court approved the sentence, and she was executed in Nanchang on December 18, 2023. Reports give her arrest date as November 28, 2019, the date in the court's findings, or November 27.
Sources
- 劳荣枝案庭审现场：劳被认定为主犯，听闻死刑判决后当场痛哭, The Paper (澎湃新闻)
- 劳荣枝今被执行死刑，最高法：犯罪手段特别残忍，主观恶性极深, Jiemian News, via Securities Times (证券时报)