<p>People get outraged when diplomatic immunity is invoked and someone gets away with something. It can be an abuse of the privilege. But that is the problem with any system. There are always exceptions and unfairnesses.</p>
<p>EK4, the driver Mullan is a #@$%! and needs to serve SERIOUS jail time if convicted. If he makes bail, fine. That’s the law and as I said, bail isn’t supposed to be a punishment. That said, both Xu and Mullan are S.O.B.s.</p>
<p>The driver Mullan has already had a number of DUI convictions and even has one pending. He was driving with a suspended license to boot. Xu, for all we know is a first offender. If the case goes to trial, he should be treated exactly the way that jurisdiction would treat any other first offender who is accused and if convicted, convicted of the crime at hand. That Xu is a wealthy international student who had dropped his courses at school should not enter into the picture. He should be treated the same as if some local had done the same thing. </p>
<p>What bothered me about this thread was that there seemed to be more outrage at Xu because he is not an AMerican, that his family has money. What happened was horrorific and a tragedy. There really is too much precedence as to what happened however, and to be just, it should so be treated. </p>
<p>As for Mullan , he seems to be someone who has demonstrated that he does not care about the law and is not going to quit his drinking and driving. A whole order of magnitude of dangerous than Xu.</p>
<p>Since I am reading this Parent threads (and FinAid threads) I have been agreeing with CPT a number of times:</p>
<p>“That Xu is a wealthy international student who had dropped his courses at school should not enter into the picture. He should be treated the same as if some local had done the same thing.”</p>
<p>Completly agree! </p>
<p>“What bothered me about this thread was that there seemed to be more outrage at Xu because he is not an A[m]erican, that his family has money.”</p>
<p>Completely agree again!</p>
<p>I feel more outrage at Xu than I do a citizen or someone who lives in a country which will extradite to the US because I am unsure he will stay in this country and pay his debt to the taxpayers and to the families whose lives he forever altered.</p>
<p>However, he may decide that going through a trial is his best option, as popular opinion in China seems to be agin him, and he would be limited in his jet setting to countries who do not have extradition agreements with the US.</p>
<p>Although this story is ignored outside of Seattle, it is reportedly all over the news in China.
Readers are used to rich Chinese paying to get away with murder but they are surprised to learn that the US also has a different system of justice for the rich.</p>
<p>Capitalism isnt pretty.</p>
<p>^From my viewpoint, this is still xenophobia.</p>
<p>Countries have different diplomatic arrangements with each other. The moment that a country issues a Visa or immigration papers to a foreign individual, it is not the role of colleges or individual citizens to discriminate against those individuals.</p>
<p>Courts do have to set bond amounts balancing the possibilities of the charged individual and the incentives for the charged individual to appear, but for us, Citizens, to be more or less sympathetic to an individual based on country of origin is as wrong as being more or less sympathetic to an individual based on race, ethnicity, religious belief, age, gender, etc.</p>