Three men convicted of organizing prostitution argued in municipal court Wednesday that a 10-year-prison sentence was too harsh of a punishment for running a website that helped users hire prostitutes.
The three men, Li Haoran, 33, and Zhu Guozheng, 33, and Yang Mingtong, 40, appealed their sentences to Shanghai No.1 Intermediate People's Court on the grounds that they didn't organize prostitution, but rather gave their users the ability to hire escorts on their own.
The court did not rule on the appeal Wednesday.
Xuhui District People's Court sentenced the men on January 28 to a decade in prison and fined each of them 50,000 yuan ($8,055) for running the website from September 6, 2010 to May 8, 2013, according to the district court's verdict. The website took in about 4.38 million yuan in revenue over the period.
In court, Li and Zhu said they created the website in August 2010 to build up an online social networking community. Later, they hired Yang to help maintain the site.
Li was in charge of the women. He said in court that he knew about 20 women willing to be escorts, and kept in close touch with five or six of them. He usually took a 30 percent to 40 percent cut of what each client paid for the service. He denied that he forced any of the women to have sex.
However, the prosecution argued that his actions constituted organizing prostitution because he drove the women to their meetings and made other arrangements on their behalf.
Zhu and Yang employed a different defense. In court, they argued that they didn't know any of the women personally and didn't deal with any of their engagements. Instead, they ran the website and collected revenue from the site's advertisers.
Yang admitted that he knew some of the advertisers were prostitutes, but he turned a blind eye to the issue as the website grew in popularity and the money rolled in.
Zhu, Yang and another employee who helped maintain the site, surnamed Lin, all shared the profits. Zhu and Yang said in court that they each earned about 200,000 yuan. The prosecution argued that Zhu and Yang were both knowing participants in the illegal activity.