Chinese ATM thief has life term cut to five years

CHINA: A MIGRANT worker who was jailed for life for stealing €16,000 from a faulty cash machine has had his term reduced to five years after a public outcry prompted a retrial, writes Clifford Coonan in Beijing.

Xu Ting (25), from the city of Guangzhou, could not believe his luck in April 2006 when only one yuan (nine cents) was deducted from his bank account on a 1,000 yuan withdrawal from an ATM.

He made 171 transactions, withdrawing 175,000 yuan (€16,000) in total. He even told his friend, who withdrew 18,000 yuan.

His friend turned himself in and was sentenced to a year in jail. Xu went on the run for a year before he was caught and sentenced to life in prison in November 2007.

The public reaction was swift. In online polls, 90 per cent of respondents said they thought the sentence was too severe.

Despite the Guangzhou Commercial Bank's insistence that it was the victim in the case, legal experts from Peking University, Tsinghua University and South China University of Technology weighed in with their opinions that the sentence was too long.

"If the bank gives you too little money, you have no way of asking for the shortfall, so if the bank gives too much money, it's the bank's fault," said one online supporter of Xu.

An appeals court ordered the Guangzhou intermediate people's court to hear the case again in January. In the court's verdict, Xu's theft charges stuck but his sentence was reduced to five years.

"The social damage caused was not huge and the crime was fairly light," the Guangzhou court said in its judgement.

Xu insisted that he was "courageously noble in mind and heart" despite the incident and said he was glad he had been caught, as he could now serve his prison time and get married.

© 2008 The Irish Times

This article appears in the print edition of the Irish Times