Zhang Hongfei was also surprised. He looked up at Lin Fangfang with some surprise, "Twenty-year statute of limitations?"
Lin Fangfang nodded: "Yes, the statute of limitations is 20 years."
The Criminal Law stipulates that any legal liability for crimes or torts is subject to a time limit, known as the statute of limitations, which starts at five years and accumulates upwards depending on the severity of the sentence, up to a maximum of twenty years. Once the statute of limitations has expired, the case will be dismissed and the perpetrator will no longer be held legally responsible.
——This is a widely-circulated interpretation of a statement on the Internet in recent years. The first half is indeed mentioned in the Criminal Law, but the second half is a pure misunderstanding: the statute of limitations for criminal cases is twenty years, which is usually used for life imprisonment and death penalty. However, as long as it is approved by the Supreme People's Procuratorate, the statute of limitations can be extended indefinitely. There is no such thing as being able to get away with it after twenty years.
Xu Man thought to herself.
and--
Zhang Hongfei: "The law does say that there is a 20-year statute of limitations, but that is for reporting criminal behavior. Once the public security organs file a case for investigation, if the suspect evades investigation or trial, the statute of limitations will not apply. Did you know this?"
Lin Fangfang: “…what?”
Zhang Hongfei: "To put it simply, if the case has been reported to the police, or the suspect has been wanted online, then no matter how long it has been since the crime, the person will be held accountable. It doesn't matter if you have been on the run for 20, 30, or 40 years. You will still be subject to legal trial after being arrested. It is not possible that you can be acquitted just because 20 years have passed."
Lin Fangfang looked a little confused, and said in a daze: "I... I don't know, this is not mentioned in the novel. But this law is of no use to me now, you are so powerful, you caught me in just a few days. I didn't expect to escape for twenty years, but I thought it was possible to escape for a year or two. In any case, I can be free for a while, which is worth it compared to the years when I was a prostitute or a mistress. But... it's only ten days, too short, really too short..."
Zhang Hongfei: "What were you thinking about when you were running away?"
Lin Fangfang: "I didn't think about anything, just where to go in the future and how to spend the money on hand. I have worked for five or six years and saved about 200,000 or 300,000 yuan, plus the 60,000 yuan I got from Deng Zhikang and a little bit from my boss Cheng Yao, a total of more than 300,000 yuan, which is a large sum of money. I thought, I will go back to my hometown first, give part of the money to my mother, and then live somewhere else. Because the police will definitely track me down and come to my hometown to look for me, I can't stay at home. I didn't expect that I would be caught by a few of you who suddenly rushed out just after I got off the train station..."
The last sentence made Xu Man's heart move, and she couldn't help but think divergently, because this arrest operation was led by Qin Shen.
After finding out Lin Fangfang's ticket purchase information on the Internet, Qin Shen convened an emergency meeting and rushed to Ningzhou with four or five people. They waited for people at the train platform and successfully captured and arrested her at 8:16 pm on August 16.
The reason why she remembered the time so clearly was because Xu Man had been waiting in the team that night. The case had been investigated for more than ten days, and almost everything that needed to be investigated had been investigated. They were just waiting for the suspect to be brought back for investigation. The team was not busy, so she could have gone home on time after get off work. Qin Shen also specifically told her to go home early and not wait for the results in the team, as it was not safe to go back late at night. But this was her first time to be involved in a cross-provincial pursuit. Although she knew that the worst-case scenario for this operation would be failure of the arrest, Qin Shen and his team would not be in any danger. After all, the other party was just an ordinary woman. Could it be that a few well-trained criminal police officers could not defeat her? But she still couldn't help but worry, and waited for the results with others in the team until the early morning before returning.
In fact, she didn't need to go back so late. It was just after eight o'clock in the evening when Qin Shen and his men successfully captured Lin Fangfang. The news was immediately passed back to the detachment, and the time difference was no more than ten minutes. If she had gone home at that time, there would have been no problem at all. However, everyone in the team was waiting for the result of the arrest and had no intention of doing anything else. They waited until the news of the success of the operation came before starting to eat dinner. She stayed in the team and had dinner with Zhao Jia and the others. By the time they finished, it was already past nine o'clock.
It was not too late at that time, just a quarter after nine. Xu Man was originally planning to take a taxi back, and when Qin Shen asked her, she would say that she had gone home early. Unexpectedly, he called her at that time and asked her if she had rested. She accidentally failed to cover up the sound of Li Shijie bragging to others, and the fact that she was still in the detachment was exposed.
Qin Shen's reaction to this was to remain silent for a few seconds, then sigh helplessly.
——I knew you wouldn’t listen to me. I called you an hour late on purpose, thinking you should be home by now. I didn’t expect you to still be in the detachment? Really...
She could only smile cautiously and said coquettishly that she was worried about him. Qin Shen asked her, "I'll be back to Mingzhou at about twelve o'clock. Are you going to wait for me until twelve o'clock?" She agreed without thinking, which made the other party speechless for a long time. In the end, he had no choice but to let her go and let her continue to stay in the team and wait for him. The two of them returned home together in the early morning.
"...When did you kill the victim? Do you remember the time?" Unconsciously, Xu Man's thoughts went further and further away. Fortunately, Zhang Hongfei's voice rang out in time, bringing her back to her senses. She realized that it was now an interrogation period, and as an audience recorder, she should not be distracted. She quickly collected her thoughts and listened carefully to the conversation between the two.
Lin Fangfang thought for a moment, shook her head and said, "I can't quite remember. It was around one or two in the afternoon. It wasn't raining at that time, just cloudy. It started to rain when I was halfway through the run. It was raining heavily, and even the muddy ground on the side of the road was covered with layers of yellow soil."
"At the time, I thought that even God was helping me to erase the traces of murder. It seemed that my action of killing those two people was indeed the right thing to do. I felt at ease and stopped running. I walked down the mountain slowly, looking like an outlier among the people running around to avoid the rain. But I am not a normal person. No normal person would live like I did for five years. I had enough. I don't regret killing them, not at all."
…
Lin Fangfang's interrogation lasted for more than three hours. She had a good attitude and cooperated with the police's questioning, but she kept talking about other things, muttering about some past events and thoughts in a daze. She had to be questioned repeatedly to get her attention back, which wasted a lot of time.
After the interrogation, Lin Fangfang was sent back to the detention center. Xu Man stayed in the interrogation room to sort out the documents and replay the surveillance to see if there were any omissions in the records. Seeing Zhang Hongfei beside her put away his folders and stood up to leave, she thought for a moment and stopped him, asking, "Team leader, do you think Lin Fangfang's mental state is a little bit off? I think she has been in a daze..."
"A little bit." Zhang Hongfei seemed to be thinking about something. "Maybe she has been under too much stress recently. After all, she is just an ordinary person. She has been forced to live a life she doesn't want to live for five years, and has become the murderer of two murders. It is understandable that her mental state is fluctuating, but it is not yet to the point where we need to apply for a mental evaluation. We will decide later."
Xu Man's original intention was not to exonerate Lin Fangfang or to get a mental evaluation report. She just felt that her mental state was somewhat different from that of normal people. She had doubts in her mind, so she asked. After hearing what Zhang Hongfei said, she nodded without saying anything else. She turned her attention back to the computer in front of her and carefully checked the documents.
The door behind him was opened and closed. It should be Zhang Hongfei who walked out. Xu Man checked the documents and replayed the video. After confirming that the record was correct, she was about to turn off the computer when the door of the interrogation room was opened again.
She thought Zhang Hongfei had dropped something, but when she turned around, she saw that it was Qin Shen who walked in, and she was stunned.
"team leader?"
"Not ready yet?" Qin Shen smiled at her, walked over and put his hand on her shoulder, and the other hand fell on the back of the chair where she was sitting, leaning over to look at her computer, "Old Zhang has been gone for a while, why are you still here? There are a lot of things that need to be sorted out. I heard from Old Zhang that the mental state of the criminal suspect seems to be a little bad this time, and the interrogation took a long time. Do you remember too many things?"
"Fortunately, I've already sorted it out and was just about to leave." Xu Man turned off the computer, quickly sorted out the documents on hand, put them all into the folder, and stood up with them, "Why are you here?"
"Waiting for you to eat." Qin Shen replied with a smile, lowered his head and kissed her on the lips.
Xu Man was startled and took a step back. After being stopped by the table, she lowered her voice and said to him, "What are you doing? This is in the detachment!"
"There's no one around." Qin Shen smiled nonchalantly, and stretched out his hand to put it around her waist, but she glared at him and slapped him away, so he took it back and put it away properly, "I've been waiting for you in the office for more than an hour, and it's almost twelve o'clock. You guys aren't done yet, so I came over to check on you."
Xu Man's attention was successfully diverted by him. She no longer dwelled on the fact that he had just kissed her secretly. She lowered her head to glance at her phone and was a little surprised: "It's already twelve o'clock?"
She came to listen to the recording early in the morning and thought it would last until ten o'clock at most, but she didn't expect it to be twelve o'clock.
Qin Shen smiled happily: "Yeah, you don't even think about how long this interrogation took. It's my fault for not reminding you in advance. This is Lao Zhang's style. He asks very detailed questions. The person being questioned feels very good, but the person sitting next to him taking notes doesn't feel very good. How about what do you want to eat for lunch?"
"I haven't decided yet, what do you want to eat?"
"How about roast duck? There's a new roast duck restaurant across the street. It's a branch of a century-old brand in Xinjing. It serves authentic roast duck. You must have heard of it."
"Roast duck? Isn't it a bit too oily..."
"It doesn't matter. I'll eat roast duck, and you can eat their duck bone rice. This one isn't oily."
“…”
Continue read on readnovelmtl.com
