Qingdao restaurant owner sentenced to 6 months in prison for making mutton soup with poppy shells
On April 3, the Procuratorate of the Southern District of Qingdao announced a drug case involving a small restaurant soup. Xiao Liu (pseudonym) is a community drug rehabilitation worker. One day, as usual, he went to the police station for a urine test as usual. The police told Xiao Liu that his urine test was positive for morphine and asked him if he was taking drugs. Xiao Liu immediately said that he was not taking drugs, he only drank a bowl of mutton soup at the restaurant at noon. After testing, the morphine component detected in Xiao Liu's urine test really came from this bowl of mutton soup.
On March 25, 2019, the Shinan District Procuratorate adopted the procedure of pleading guilty and punishing to prosecute Zhang, the defendant suspected of the crime of producing and selling toxic and harmful food.
Defendant Zhang is the operator of a restaurant in Shinan District, Qingdao. He heard that adding poppy shells in the mutton soup will taste better. In order to attract customers to increase sales, since February 28, 2019, the poppy husks obtained from others were put into the boiled mutton soup base, which was then made into mutton soup and sold to customers. The sales profit was more than 1,400 yuan, which was later seized. After Zhang arrived at the case, he voluntarily confessed his crimes truthfully. It was identified that the mutton soup contained 136μg/kg of morphine.
After accepting the case, the prosecutor reviewed the case and found that the facts of the case were clear, the evidence was indeed sufficient, and the suspect truthfully confessed his crime and pleaded guilty. The prosecutor decided to apply the leniency system in this case. Combining with the situation that Zhang is the only minor's supporter, he filed a six-month imprisonment sentence for defendant Zhang with a one-year probation and a fine of 2,000 yuan to the Shinan District Court in accordance with the law. He is prohibited from food production within the probation period.
The Shinan District Court fully adopted the sentencing recommendations of the Shinan District Procuratorate and sentenced Zhang to six months’ imprisonment and one year’s suspended sentence. A fine of two thousand yuan was also imposed, and food production and sales activities were prohibited during the probation period.
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