– Wrongful convictions –
China’s courts, controlled by the ruling Communist Party, have a near-100 percent conviction rate in criminal cases and confessions extracted under dubious conditions are commonplace.
In Hugjiltu’s case, authorities interrogated the teenager for 48 hours, after which he confessed to having raped and choked the woman in the toilet of a textile factory, the state-run China Daily newspaper reported in November. He was executed 61 days after the woman’s death.
Hugjiltu’s family tried for nearly a decade to prove his innocence, according to reports, and the Higher People’s Court officially began a retrial in November.
Many on social media decried what they saw as insufficient compensation for such a grave miscarriage of justice, with one asking: “Is 30,000 yuan really enough to buy the life of a family member?”
Others demanded the court officials and police responsible for the original conviction be held responsible.
“We must bring all those morally corrupt public security officers to justice,” another user said on Sina Weibo, a Twitter-like microblogging platform.
China executes more people than the rest of the world combined, according to rights groups. The country put an estimated 2,400 people to death last year.
China has occasionally exonerated wrongfully executed convicts after others came forward to confess their crimes, or in some cases because the supposed murder victim was later found alive.
In one case, police claimed a dead body was that of a woman who had recently disappeared and charged Teng Xingshan with her murder. Teng was executed by firing squad in 1989, but in 1993 the supposedly murdered woman returned to the village saying she had been kidnapped.
Teng was exonerated of all crimes in 2005.
Several other high-profile wrongful convictions have sparked public outrage in recent years.
Last year, a man who served 17 years in prison for killing his wife was declared innocent by an appeals court in the eastern province of Anhui.
A few months earlier two men who had been sentenced to death and life in prison in 2004 for the alleged rape of a 17-year-old girl were also acquitted.
Doubts have been raised about several high-profile death penalty cases in the US. But the Innocence Project, a group advocating for those it says are wrongfully convicted, does not highlight on its website any instances of executed people later having their convictions quashed.
About The Author
