The wrongful 11-year imprisonment of She Xianglin for the murder of his wife, who reappeared alive and well last week, has attracted the widespread attention of the legal community.

Li Guifang, vice director of the All-China Lawyers Association's Beijing-based Criminal Committee, said She's case demonstrates a failure of the entire legal system in Hubei Province.

"The police should bear the brunt of the responsibility, because they falsely identified the body, the major evidence in this case, and probably extorted a confession through torture," Li said.

Although having found discrepancies between the still-unidentified body and She's missing wife, including of their clothes, the procuratorate still started legal proceedings instead of conducting further investigations.

The courts failed to clarify the truth even after a retrial.

Legal experts said She's case is far from exceptional in China's flawed criminal justice system.

Nie Shubin, a young farmer in north China's Hebei Province, was executed in 1994 after being convicted of raping and murdering a local woman, but a suspect apprehended this year in the central province of Henan confessed to the crime.

"Although strictly forbidden by law, forced confession has been common because the police are often under great pressure from above to solve criminal cases," a law professor told Xinhua.

Li said defendants' right to legal counsel, also provided by criminal procedural law, has been denied by many police departments in practice.

"If a lawyer had been appointed in the first place, She's case might have gone differently," Li said, but police often block face-to-face interviews between lawyers and suspects, or give only a few minutes for them to talk before interrogation.

Finally out of jail, She told reporters that police had forced him to confess during interrogation.

"The police tortured me by not letting me sleep for 10 days and finally made me leave my finger mark on the documents when I had almost lost consciousness," he said, adding that he would be seeking compensation from local courts and police.

A medical examination after She's release found he now suffered from double vision and a severe spine condition, which left him hardly able to sit. He also said that the end of one of his fingers was cut off in jail.

Lu Dingbo, now vice-director of the Police Bureau of Jingshan County and the person who was in charge of the initial investigation, expressed regret but blamed the unavailability of DNA tests at the time.

(China Daily April 6, 2005)