On January 11, at the case telling meeting of "Legal Supervision: Watching For Fairness and Justice and Guarding a Better Life" jointly sponsored by the Zhejiang Provincial Procuratorate and Zhejiang Daily Newspaper Group, "Nine Seconds" brought by Kong Fanyu of the Yuhang District Procuratorate told the real experience of Ms. Gu being secretly photographed in the process of picking up the courier downstairs and encountering social death due to online defamation. As the first case to investigate and deal with online defamation through public prosecution procedures, this case effectively activated the sleeping clause of private prosecution to public prosecution of defamation crimes, and released the legal signal of criminal protection of citizens' personality rights in the Internet era.
Darkest
The accident occurred on the evening of July 7 last year, 28-year-old Ms. Gu, as usual, went to the express delivery station next to the community to pick up the courier, but was secretly filmed a 9-second video, and the changes that followed surprised her.
"Lonely Young Woman Cheats on The Courier Brother" - a spurious pulp fiction plot is staged in the WeChat group where Ms. Gu is absent. In the 9 days from the 7th to the 16th, the initiators Lang and He successively uploaded 39 fabricated screenshots of chat records, accompanied by videos and pictures, which triggered a large number of vulgar and obscene comments.
On August 5, the above chat records were merged and forwarded by others, and spread to more than 110 WeChat groups (about 26,000 group members), 7 WeChat public accounts (read more than 20,000 times) and other online platforms.
On August 7, a full month after being secretly filmed, the "protagonist" Ms. Gu woke up like a dream, the community girlfriends, Beijing friends, and even former colleagues abroad are reminding her of the seriousness of the development, the car friends group, the owner group to the mother and baby group, the childcare group and even the drama resource sharing group have Ms. Gu's figure, and the company's leaders, colleagues, and friends also sent her messages asking what was going on.
The company was dissuaded, re-employment was blocked, and a depressed state was diagnosed... Realizing that she was saddled with negative news, Ms. Gu said desperately: "The term 'social death' used to be very strange to me, but now I find out that I am so close to myself." ”
Ms. Gu is courageous. On August 7, Ms. Gu reported the case to the Yuhang District Bureau of the Hangzhou Municipal Public Security Bureau on the suspected defamation of Lang and He. The Yuhang Branch of the Hangzhou Municipal Public Security Bureau placed Lang and He under administrative detention for 9 days on August 13 of the same year. On October 26 of the same year, Ms. Gu entrusted an agent ad litem to file a private criminal prosecution with the Yuhang District People's Court of Hangzhou.
However, the rumors that continue to ferment have not stopped. From August to December, the matter was reported by a number of media outlets, triggering a heated discussion on the Internet, of which the Weibo topic alone, "Rumors that cheating women have not been able to find a job so far", was read by 470 million people and discussed 58,000 times.
"I don't dare to think about this matter, but I can't control it, every time I think about it, my heart beats with full horsepower, the whole person begins to suffocate, and my spirit and emotions begin to lose control." Ms. Gu wrote on Weibo.
Turn
Things are finally starting to turn around. On December 14, Ms. Gu waited for the good news that the Yuhang District Court in Hangzhou city filed a private prosecution case, and at the same time, the online call for a heavy blow to online violence from the legal level was also rising, and the escalating public opinion attracted the attention and attention of the Supreme People's Procuratorate.
After careful study, we believe that the behavior of Lang and He not only damages Ms. Gu's personality rights, but also spreads rapidly through the specific space of the Network, seriously disrupting the public order of the network society and undermining the sense of security of the general public, and should be prosecuted.
On December 22, our Yuhang District Procuratorate issued a procuratorial recommendation to the public security organs, suggesting that the public security organs file a case for investigation. This procuratorial recommendation is not long, but it is only a few more than 300 words, but it brings together the consensus of the procuratorial organs at the four levels. For the first time, it explicitly defined egregious online violence as "seriously endangering social order"; for the first time, it still recommends switching to public prosecution procedures when the parties have already sued themselves.
Three days later, the public security organs filed and investigated the suspected defamation case of Lang and He. Our hospital and the public security organs explained to Ms. Gu the significance and necessity of filing a public prosecution and suggested that she withdraw the prosecution. On December 26, Ms. Gu withdrew her indictment to the court.
clear
Private prosecution cases have been smoothly converted into public prosecution cases, but this is only the beginning of justice.
In order to ensure the smooth progress of the investigation, we intervened in advance to guide the investigation, focusing on the criteria of "serious circumstances" of the crime of defamation and the public prosecution situation of "serious endangering social order and national interests".
The entire forensic process lasted for nearly a month, and finally 18 volumes of case files and 76 CDs were formed. When the defense lawyers and agents involved in this case first saw the piled up case files, they were quite surprised: it seems that from private prosecution to public prosecution, the advantages of evidence collection are self-evident.
On January 20 this year, the Yuhang Branch of the Hangzhou Municipal Public Security Bureau transferred the case to our hospital for review and prosecution. We conducted a comprehensive review of the evidence, during which Lang and He also sincerely repented and paid compensation.
Subsequently, according to the criminal acts committed by the criminal suspects and relevant laws and regulations, combined with their attitude of admitting guilt and accepting punishment, we prudently put forward corresponding sentencing recommendations, and the two criminal suspects also signed affidavits admitting guilt and accepting punishment.
On February 26, our court prosecuted Lang X and He X for defamation in accordance with the law, and proposed to the two defendants a fixed sentence of one year imprisonment and two years of probation. On April 30, the Yuhang District Court of Hangzhou City held a public hearing in accordance with the law and made a judgment in court, adopting the facts of the crime and sentencing recommendation alleged by the procuratorate.
So far, this rumor-mongering storm has been satisfactorily resolved and has also marked a profound mark of the rule of law.
rethink
Back to the original question: "How long does it take for life to be rewritten?" ”
It only takes 9 seconds. However, in order to heal this scar, it took us 191 days from the issuance of the procuratorial recommendation. It has been 10 months since Ms. Gu fell into the whirlpool of public opinion. We can't help but sigh that the cost of infringement is too low, and the cost of rights protection is really too high.
When the Internet is increasingly becoming an important activity field for modern people, each of us may have a "narrow encounter" with the increasingly widespread network violence. Under the circumstance that "administrative punishment" cannot effectively protect the legitimate rights and interests of citizens, and private prosecution and evidence collection are facing many difficulties, I believe that this case gives a solution with the value of the times: it activates the connection clause between private prosecution procedure and public prosecution procedure, so that the legislative intention of article 246 of the Criminal Law can be truly realized. Many experts and scholars have also heard their voices.
In such a case of online defamation against the general public, the public security organ initiates a criminal investigation and the procuratorate initiates a public prosecution, which is not only a response to the new requirements of the Civil Code for the protection of personality rights, but also a wake-up call to the sleeping provisions of the Criminal Law. At the same time, we have also witnessed the public's demand for legal protection in the online society from the undercurrent to the forefront, and the praise of countless netizens has made us truly realize that the "sense of rule of law" is so accessible.
Everyone is not an island. I remember Ms. Gu once said: It is indeed an unfortunate thing to encounter such a senseless disaster, but how fortunate I am on this road of safeguarding rights, there are so many netizens and media who support me, and there are political and legal organs that enforce the law impartially. Today's result is not a victory for my personal rights defense, but the result of the joint efforts of thousands of people who oppose online violence.
(Original title "Nine Seconds", edited by Li Ru)