my internship

[espresso]

I got a chance to work as a prosecutor’s assistant last summer,
which was my first professional experience.
On the first morning I came to the office, Ms Wang, the prosecutor,
told me to bind some files for her. It was surprising that they still
kept the most traditional way of binding – first chiseling three
wholes in each pile of the paper, then binding all the sheets together
with a long, cotton thread. I was told to follow this way and not
allowed to use the stapler. It was a tedious but no easy work and took
me almost one hour to finish.
This was the beginning of the first day. Actually, during my
temporary job as a prosecutor’s assistant, I had to spend some time
binding the files every morning. This was what I had not expected at
all. I gradually learned that in the near future, I would have to begin
my career from the most trivial everyday routines.
Ms Wang was satisfied with my work and she soon let me help her
writing the indictments, thus I was able to read all the cases
investigated by the police and see how the suspects’ intents and
purposes were internally related to their criminal acts. I was
surprised again. By studying the background of each case, I found that
before the suspects committed the criminal offenses, most of them had
been badly in need for help either financially or emotionally. However,
nobody cared them. They became the abandonees of the society.
In one of the cases, a migrant worker from Xinjiang had not been paid
by the construction company for four months. In order to go back home
by train, he stole 26 yuan 60 cents on a trolley bus and was caught
locus in quo. He tried to escape but failed, rendering the
savage，twenty minutes long beating by the police. During the beating,
he desperately bit into one of the policemen’s right hand.
I wrote the indictment against this suspect. According to the
criminal law of China, a thief who resists the arrest of police is
regarded as a robber; and if he wounded the policeman, he would be
punished much more severely. So I charged him with the crime of robbery
and proposed the sentence of five years to the judge.
But I was not willing to charge him at all. I did not believe that a
person deserved five years in prison merely because he had stolen not
more than 30 yuan. Further more, I did not believe that the term of
imprisonment would rebuild him into a so-called good and law abiding
citizen either. Instead, I thought it would only produce the despair
and hatred of the society deep in the prisoner’s heart. When he was
released, he might be more deeply discriminated and commit more serious
offenses. It would be indeed a vicious circle.
But I had to charge him. It was according to the law and according to
my duty. In two weeks time, I charged five suspects of this kind.
I remember an ambitious professor here at PKU law school once said
that “law is able to regulate every dimension of social life and help
building a harmonious society”. I had once agreed with him, but not
any longer after last summer. There are so many problems that the law
will never solve, and so many miseries that the law will never relieve.
Actually, my first working experience made my attitude towards my
future career more realistic and less idealistic. I finally understood
that there was nothing divine of being a lawyer at all.