Chinese Death Row Inmate Acquitted After 8-Year Ordeal

Nian Bin

Nian Bin was sentenced to death four times, convicted of fatally poisoning two children in eastern China. Each time, he appealed and a higher court ordered another hearing. Then on Friday, judges declared Mr. Nian not guilty and freed him from death row, abruptly ending an eight-year ordeal that lawyers said exemplified the Chinese judiciary’s reluctance to overturn its own gross injustices.

Mr. Nian maintained that he had confessed to the crime of “placing dangerous materials” — poisons — only under searing torture after his arrest. But it took a first trial, three appeals, three retrials and a review by China’s highest court before judges in Fujian Province acquitted him after concluding that the evidence marshaled by prosecutors was fatally marred by flaws and inconsistencies.

Mr. Nian, who is about 38, spent more than six of his eight years in custody in handcuffs and shackles, he wrote in a letter to his father released to Chinese news media after he was freed.

“Dad, I’ve returned,” he wrote in the letter, which was published by a Chinese news website, The Paper. Accompanying pictures show him and his family distraught and tearful.

“I had thought that only in another world would I be able to tell you about the wrong and worry I’ve been through,” he wrote. “For eight years, a man with a normal life, no illnesses or ailments, has suddenly been bound and tied on the edge of death.”

Mr. Nian was arrested in August 2006 after six neighbors in Pingtan County in Fujian were stricken with poisoning, including two children who died. The police investigators accused Mr. Nian of lacing their dinner with sodium fluoroacetate, which is used to kill vermin, to avenge their stealing business away from his grocery store.

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Source: Sinosphere, August 22, 2014

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