It took eight months more before Li was released on bail. He will not have a chance to clear his name until after his wife's murderer is executed, as is expected sometime in the next few months.
Suggestions that innocent people are being sentenced to death in the current "Strike Hard" campaign leave many people unmoved, particularly given the absence of public debate in the state-controlled media. Most Chinese are more concerned with seizing new economic opportunities than reflecting on possible injustices.
"I don't know of any case where someone was executed who didn't deserve it," says Li Boyu, a 19-year-old college student sipping a cup of tea at a fashionable cafe in the university district of Shanghai. On the contrary, she says, there are cases, like corruption and embezzlement, in which people have been given life imprisonment when she thought they deserved the death penalty.
Li Boyu is typical of her generation. For her and her peers, who have known only economic expansion, China is a country of opportunity, not oppression, and the Communist Party is responsible for having created the space in which they thrive.
"If public security is good, ordinary people can live peacefully," she said, then cited an ancient Chinese idiom: "Kill one to warn a hundred."
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