The Chinese Supreme Court yesterday ruled that a young man executed 21 years ago for rape and murder had been not guilty.
Nie Shubin (聶樹斌) was 20 at the time of his 1995 execution for crimes he was accused of committing in the northern city of Shijiazhuang in August of 1994.
Another man, Wang Shujin (王書金), confessed to the crimes in 2005 while in police custody, although a legal review of the case did not get under way until 2014.
In its ruling, the court cited numerous examples of negligence and procedural errors by police and prosecutors, including the fact that Nie was singled out as a suspect “without a shred of evidence.”
It also said it could not rule out that Nie’s testimony was coerced by torture or other means, a frequent accusation against the legal system that relies heavily on confessions to gain convictions.
China ordered speeded-up trials and executions during anti-crime campaigns in the 1990s, leading to frequent cutting of corners by legal authorities. Two years ago, another court ruled that 18-year-old Huugjilt, an ethnic Mongolian who was executed in 1996 for rape and murder, also was innocent after another man confessed to the crime.
The court awarded Huugjilt’s parents compensation.
However, under reforms in recent years, all death penalties are now automatically reviewed by the supreme court and the justices say executions are carried out only for the most heinous crimes. The exact number of people put to death is a state secret, but rights groups say China remains the world’s top executioner.
Chinese legal academic Xu Xin (徐昕), a prominent advocate of legal reforms to reduce wrongful convictions, said Nie’s case has emerged as highly representative of the country’s problems with miscarriages of justice.
“In China’s legal and social spheres, this case has garnered the greatest concern and has the most influence. Everyone’s views on this case have basically been the same — that there was grave injustice,” Xu said.
However, the fact that it took this long for him to be exonerated shows the challenges ordinary people face in gaining legal redress in China, he said.
“A vindication like this implies that compensation would have to be made and someone could potentially be held responsible for the mistake, so that makes authorities unwilling to make an active push to correct the injustice,” he said.
He credited the Chinese media, defense lawyers and others who drew attention to the case for the court’s overturning of the verdict, but said that the problem at the heart of the issue remained China’s lack of an independent judiciary.
“The police, prosecutors and the court mainly cooperate with each other, not as checks against each other, defense lawyers aren’t able to play their roles fully, while officials can easily interfere in cases. These all contribute to wrongful convictions,” Xu said.
MONEY MATTERS: Xi was to highlight projects such as a new high-speed railway between Belgrade and Budapest, as Serbia is entirely open to Chinese trade and investment Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic yesterday said that “Taiwan is China” as he made a speech welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to Belgrade, state broadcaster Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) said. “We have a clear and simple position regarding Chinese territorial integrity,” he told a crowd outside the government offices while Xi applauded him. “Yes, Taiwan is China.” Xi landed in Belgrade on Tuesday night on the second leg of his European tour, and was greeted by Vucic and most government ministers. Xi had just completed a two-day trip to France, where he held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron as the
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion