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| Marcel Strigberger |
A guy called Wang in northern China was bored with life. And so he posted a video saying he was a notorious criminal who had extorted 30 million yuan, about US$4 million from a company. He added that he also had in his possession a machine gun with lots of bullets. His chutzpah was certainly magnanimous adding that he was offering a reward of $4,000 to anybody who finds him. He got his wish of being discovered within a day as police raided his home. They searched and found no cash or weapons. Actually ,Wang confessed and told the police he just made up the story as he was bored and frustrated.
I wonder if the officers gave him a caution upon arrest. “Sir, you have the right to remain silent. You are under arrest for possession of nothing.”
Actually, they did charge him with social disruption and dissemination of false information.
However, I think the man has a bucket of defences to the charges.
Firstly I fail to see the social disruption. His posts gained about 2,500 likes. Those viewers were hardly disrupted. He also triggered 350,000 views and 80 comments. No clue what they were as I am not up to speed on my Mandarin. Given the $4,000 reward, maybe many asked for his whereabouts. Reasonable expectation.
Or perhaps they asked how they could acquire a machine gun. Or some of them may just have commented, “Way the go, Wang.” Social media is often bizarre.
As for the false information I think about the iconic British Carbolic Smokeball case (Carlill v. Carbolic Smoke Ball Co). The company offered a reward of 100 pounds to any customers who used their flu-prevention smokeball and still came down with the bug. The plaintiff got sick and sued after the company refused to pay up. The defendant claimed the reward offer was not binding, but “mere puffery.” The court did not buy the mere puffery argument.
However, the law may be different in China. Mere puffery may be a good defence there. I Googled “Chinese law, mere puffery” and my first listing said, “Almond puff pastry. Merely 20 minutes to prepare. Delicious.” Who knows?
There is also a good chance of challenging Wang’s confession to the police. If they found no weapons or evidence of extortion, then if his statement that these crimes never happened is knocked out, the police have neither the crime nor the joke. They have, as they say in Chinese, bupkis.
I see a further defence, namely insanity. Did Wang appreciate the difference between right and wrong? What would compel anybody to go online and confess to a crime he did not commit? And let us not forget the accused’s motive. He claimed boredom. Boredom is actually a known mental disorder. I ran it by a shrink friend of mine, and he told me a large percentage of his patients were accountants. He related a story to me about Freud calling his accountant about the status of his income tax return and the fellow responded sobbing, “Doctor Freud, if I have to do one more of these, I’ll jump off the highest bridge over the Danube.”
It would not surprise me if the seminal insanity defence case of M’Naughten is good law in China. This case begs to be the go-to standard for insanity. Even the name is crazy. What other name has an apostrophe between the M and the N? Nuts in spades.
I wish Wang well.
What I certainly foresee now is the Chinese police adapting their investigation of future “crimes” of this nature. Some yokel will once again tout his criminal exploits on social media and the police will be ready to charge in with a special canine unit composed of an elite group of beagles, where the dogs are trained to sniff for nothing. Baddabing, baddaboom.
Marcel Strigberger retired from his Greater Toronto Area litigation practice and continues the more serious business of humorous author and speaker. His book, Boomers, Zoomers, and Other Oomers: A Boomer-biased Irreverent Perspective on Aging, is available on Amazon (e-book) and in paper version. His new(!) book First, Let’s Kill the Lawyer Jokes: An Attorney’s Irreverent Serious Look at the Legal Universe, is available on Amazon, Apple and other book places. Visit www.marcelshumour.com. Follow him on X: @MarcelsHumour.
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