Why this sentence must be handled with caution

As a legal reporter, I've written about a number of fatal tragedies over the past five years. But the case when a young man was convicted of killing his roommate by spiking drinking water with toxic chemicals in Shanghai in 2013 was a rare incident that made me want to know more.

When I saw on the Internet that the Supreme People's Court had started to listen to the lawyers of the convict, Lin Senhao, because the court is reviewing his death penalty, I sat up and could not get to sleep later.

Lin, 28, a medical student at Fudan University, was sentenced to death for murdering his roommate, Huang Yang, in February 2014. Huang died of liver, kidney and lung failure more than two weeks after falling ill.