Innocent people being prosecuted and sentenced is the last thing a society with a mature rule of law should tolerate, but no judicial system can be free of wrong cases. What matters is a mechanism to reduce the rate of wrong cases to the minimum. So it is laudable for China's judicial experts to admit that judicial workers are fallible and that the mechanism must be improved to reduce the number of wrong cases to the minimum.
A research report by criminology experts with Renmin University of China reveals that at least 164 innocent people were tried and sentenced to different years of imprisonment in the past three decades. Their research finds that most of them were prosecuted on charges such as murder, rape, robbery and drug smuggling. This coincides with an investigation of wrong cases by the Supreme People's Procuratorate in 2004.
In a forum attended by more than 100 prosecutors nationwide last week, they pointed out that most of the wrong cases were revealed by coincidences and then amends made. This underscores the lack of an effective mechanism to re-examine the tried cases.
In one of the most sensational ones, a man named She Xianglin was arrested on charges for murdering his wife, who went missing. He was tortured to confess and sentenced to 15 years in 1994. Fortunately, his wife showed up 11 years after he went behind bars. He was rehabilitated and paid 450,000 yuan ($66,170) in compensation in 2005. He would have never been rehabilitated had his wife not surfaced.
As some prosecutors suggest, unreasonable pressure from some government leaders on judicial departments to crack serious cases within a given period or connection between the number of cases cracked and the bonuses paid to police officers have, to some extent, contributed to hasty conclusion of a number of wrong cases.
In spite of the stipulation that extorting a confession by torture is a crime, torture is believed to be one of the major causes behind most wrong cases.
China has made a lot of effort to prohibit the police from using torture and there were reports about police officers being arrested and sentenced for torturing inmates detained.
In January this year, inspection teams of prosecutors were organized in some localities to regularly visit detention centers and interview inmates to see whether they are tortured. Police officers who are found to torture inmates will be punished according to law.
The Supreme People's Procuratorate will soon release a document on the re-examination of evidence in cases involving death sentence, according to the forum. Evidence found to be obtained through torture will not be used against defendants; and, neither will evidence collected by illegal means, according to the new document.
To strengthen the re-examination of the legitimacy of evidence against defendants would be an effective way to prohibit police officers from extorting confessions by illegal means including torture, and this will undoubtedly reduce the possibility of innocent people being punished.
(Xinhua News Agency August 11, 2009)