China Resists Harshly Punishing for wrongful conviction

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NYTimes

For two decades, Shang Aiyun waited for the day when the people responsible for convicting and executing her teenage son for a murder he did not commit would be held to account.

But when the moment of reckoning came this week, Ms. Shang was outraged. The authorities in Inner Mongolia announced on Sunday that only one person would face a criminal investigation in the wrongful conviction of Ms. Shang’s son, Huugjilt, while 26 others would receive minor demerits.

“These people don’t even have the courage to admit their mistakes and recognize their wrongdoing,” Ms. Shang said in an interview with Global Times, a state newspaper. “How can they handle legal cases impartially in the future?”

Under President Xi Jinping, the Communist Party has made overturning cases of gross injustice a centerpiece of its efforts to overhaul the legal system, long troubled by corruption and abuse. But even as the party has moved to create a more equitable judicial system, it has resisted harsh punishments for officials involved in wrongful convictions, wary of creating instability.

No officials were punished after a court in Zhejiang Province announced this week that the evidence used to convict a man of murder 22 years ago was insufficient. Similarly, in 2014, after a judge found serious flaws in the evidence used to convict a man in Fujian Province of poisoning two children, officials emerged unscathed.

The case of Mr. Huugjilt, who went by one name, became one of the most well-publicized cases of injustice in China in recent years, galvanizing activists across the country. He was executed by a firing squad in 1996, 62 days after he was convicted of raping and killing a woman in a public toilet at a textile factory in Hohhot, the Inner Mongolian capital.

Mr. Huugjilt, 18, confessed to the crime after being interrogated for 48 hours, but legal experts cast doubt on the proceedings. In 2014, an Inner Mongolian court posthumously exonerated him, citing insufficient evidence, nine years after a serial murderer and rapist confessed to killing the woman.

In China, legal officials often face enormous pressure to solve cases, and the police are known for employing torture to extract confessions.

Maya Wang, a researcher for Human Rights Watch in Hong Kong, said the reluctance of officials to impose severe punishments in the case of Mr. Huugjilt set a dangerous precedent.

“If the authorities cannot offer even a modicum of justice in a prominent case like Huugjilt’s,” Ms. Wang wrote in an email, “what hope is there for the many others who try to seek accountability for the torture and mistreatment they’d suffered in detention?”

The authorities in Inner Mongolia did not respond to requests for comment.

While Chinese officials have become more transparent about wrongful conviction cases in recent years — in 2014, more than 1,300 court decisions were reheard, according to the government — punishment for those accused of falsifying evidence and using coercive techniques is often lax.

Last year, China’s top judge, Zhou Qiang of the Supreme People’s Court, apologized for a raft of wrongful convictions and vowed to work to prevent similar injustices in the future. But he did not say what the government would do about those responsible for previous miscarriages of justice.

He Weifang, a law professor at Peking University who has argued for the abolition of the death penalty in China, said it was important to punish those directly responsible for wrongful convictions. In China, he said, higher-level officials like judges and prosecutors are often shielded from investigation, leaving lower-level officials to take the blame.

“The people punished are not the real decision-makers, so the authorities can only give them lighter punishments,” he said. “They are not the decision-makers. They are only the executors.”

In the case of Mr. Huugjilt, 11 former police officers, seven former employees of the procurator’s office, five former employees of the Inner Mongolia higher people’s court and three people from the intermediate people’s court in Hohhot received demerits.

Fu Hualing, a professor of law at the University of Hong Kong, said it was possible that more severe punishments would be announced later, as the investigation progressed.

“The problem is the institutional interests of the judges, the police officers and the prosecutors,” he said. “The question is whether the central authority has enough persuasion to really force the institution to be accountable.”

In a possible sign of the central government’s interest in pressuring local judicial officials, Chinese state media have heaped attention on the case, including reports on critical comments made by Mr. Huugjilt’s mother, Ms. Shang.

A recent editorial in China Daily said, “The failure to follow the principle of assumption of innocence and punishment of crimes according to the law also highlights the fact that arduous efforts are needed to improve the judicial system.”

In interviews with the state media, Ms. Shang has spoken emotionally about her two decades of torment, describing how she traveled from her home in Inner Mongolia to Beijing dozens of times to plead her son’s case, only to be turned away by officials each time.

“I’m not asking everyone to be punished,” she said in a television interview. “I’m just seeking justice.”