With the 17 defendants going from zero confessions to all voluntarily admitting guilt and accepting punishment, a major new drug case handled by the procuratorate of Tongxiang City, Zhejiang Province, was finally settled, and the whole chain of crackdowns on the criminal activities of trafficking, transporting, manufacturing drugs and accommodating drug abuse was successfully realized.
On February 14, after the court initiated a public prosecution, the Tongxiang Municipal Court made a first-instance judgment, and 17 defendants were sentenced for the crimes of trafficking, transporting, and manufacturing drugs, accommodating others to take drugs, and producing poisonous and harmful food, of which the main criminals, Hu X and Hong X, were sentenced to six years' imprisonment and fined 100,000 yuan for the crimes of trafficking, transporting, and manufacturing drugs, and the remaining 15 defendants were also sentenced to fixed-term imprisonment ranging from seven months to four years and eight months, and each was fined accordingly. The reporter learned that the current judgment has taken effect.
The zero confession mist behind 4,000 cases of poisoned drinks
It all started two years ago. In December 2019, Hong, Hu and others teamed up to agree to do a new drug business together, and planned to produce drug drinks in the beverage factory of Anhui Renji. Two months later, a new type of poisonous drink called "moves zero" was produced in the beverage factory in a total of more than 4,000 boxes, and sold to Zhejiang, Liaoning and other places, of which Tongxiang man Cui Mou bought more than 1,000 boxes of poisonous drinks, and then sold them to Han, Wei and others for the second time. In April 2020, the Tongxiang police arrested Cui, Hong and others.
Due to the large number of people involved in the case and the wide scope of the case, the Tongxiang Municipal Procuratorate immediately formed a special case team to intervene in advance in accordance with the law, put forward detailed guidance from the aspects of retrieving vehicle trajectories and call records, and actively guided the investigation.
On August 31, 2020, the case was transferred to the Tongxiang Municipal Procuratorate for review and prosecution. In the face of interrogation, all those involved in the case avoided subjective and deliberate drug crimes.
Zero confessions! The prosecutor knows that he has encountered a "hard stubble", how to break through? From the massive information of more than a dozen mobile phones involved in the case, the prosecutor tore open a hole.
The eye of a problem-solver hidden in a huge amount of information
The procurator handling the case screened more than 300 G of chat information in the mobile phone involved in the case one by one, and found that these people had a strong sense of anti-investigation, usually one person has several accounts, and different groups have been established between different accounts, which adds great difficulty to the evidence combing work. Just as the case was pressing forward, a verdict in Hong's mobile phone caught the attention of the prosecutor. According to the judgment, in December 2019, a drug-related person was sentenced by the Yangpu District Court of Shanghai for the crime of selling and transporting drugs for selling and transporting "Youku" drinks.
Why did this verdict appear on the mobile phone involved in the case, and what is the relationship between "moves zero" and "youku"?
Along the clues, the prosecutor found that Hong had mentioned in the chat that "this time the drink and Youku do not change the soup and do not change the medicine", and other people's chat records have also appeared many times in the chat records of "the earliest time to get Youku", "see the Verdict head in Shanghai will be fried", "The goods are exactly the same as Youku" and other words. A co-offender also made a clear confession that he had previously produced "Youku" poisonous drinks in conjunction with Hong, Hu and others. There are indications that "Youku" and "Moves Zero" are the same criminal gangs operating. With the assistance of the investigative organs, the special case team collected evidence from the upper home of the person sentenced by the Yangpu District Court of Shanghai Municipality, and finally confirmed that the "Youku" poisonous drink was indeed manufactured and sold by Hong, Hu and others.
Knowing that the "Yuku" drink produced has been identified as a drug, the "moves zero" of the same formula was conspired to produce, which completely confirms the subjective knowledge of the criminal suspect.
In order to further strengthen the evidence, the procurator handling the case listed a detailed outline of supplementary investigation, guided the investigation organs to collect evidence from Hong, Hu and others to manufacture and sell "Youku", the experience of the personnel involved in the case, the transaction of drug amounts, the logistics information of drug transportation, and the publicity of new drugs in KTV and other places involved in the case, and froze the accounts of drug recipients for the first time, completely "breaking the money and cutting off the blood".
The whole chain of strikes under the commensurate punishment of criminal responsibility
In the process of review, the special case team also discovered that Hu X, Ji X and other three people had not yet been filed, so they immediately sent a case filing supervision document to the investigation organs, and soon after, the three people were arrested and arrested.
The case file shows that the poisonous drink was provided by Hu Mou as a "secret recipe", and Hong organized others to produce it in Ji Mou's beverage factory. Ji Mou confessed that when signing the production order, the other party pretended that the poisonous drink was just an ordinary drink, and later he accidentally noticed that the "secret recipe" had been added to the drink. Fearing that it was a drug, he detained more than 3,000 cases of drinks and forced the other party to learn that the ingredient of the "secret recipe" was butanediol. "I asked the experts in the industry, and they told me that this thing is toxic, cannot be added to food, and is harmful to the human body." Ji admitted that after learning that the food produced was poisonous and harmful, he did not stop the behavior, but asked them to sign a letter of guarantee that "the drink is not a drug" and agreed to remove more than 3,000 boxes of drinks that were detained. This claim was also corroborated in the confessions of other co-defendants.
What is the "secret recipe" butanediol? Should Ji's behavior be regarded as the crime of producing toxic or harmful food or a joint crime of manufacturing drugs?
Adhering to the principle of proportionality between criminal responsibility and punishment, the special case team immediately guided the investigation organs to carry out investigations. It has been determined that butylene glycol is not a food raw material and cannot be added to food. Based on Ji's subjective cognition, the procuratorial organs finally determined that Ji and 3 others constituted the crime of producing toxic and harmful food.
Combined with objective evidence such as the transaction amount obtained by the investigation organs, the logistics and transportation information of poisonous drinks, and the professional experience of each criminal suspect, countless pieces of evidence are strung together into a complete chain of evidence. In the face of ironclad evidence, all 17 criminal suspects finally voluntarily admitted guilt and accepted punishment, successfully achieving a full chain crackdown on major drug cases.
If the case is to be handled well, the enterprise cannot be overthrown
In the process of handling the case, the procurator also learned that Ji's enterprise is a provincial-level leading enterprise in agricultural industrialization in Anhui Province, with nearly 100 employees, and the enterprise's production handover, employee stability, and return of bank loans need to be handled by Ji himself. After Ji was arrested for the case, the employees of the enterprise jointly applied to change the compulsory measures against Ji, and the management committee of the economic development zone where the enterprise was located also issued a corresponding situation statement.
In order to avoid the occurrence of the situation of "the case is handled and the enterprise collapses", the procurator uses the criminal policy of blending leniency and severity in accordance with the law to change the compulsory measures for Ji in accordance with the law. After handling corporate affairs in a timely and proper manner, Ji was also punished by law. On February 14 this year, Ji and three others were sentenced to two years in prison and fined 30,000 yuan for the crime of producing toxic and harmful food.
(Source: Procuratorial Daily Author: Fan Yuehong Wang Qianxia)