A court in China’s Inner Mongolia may start a retrial for a 19 year-old man who was wrongly executed 18 years ago for murder and rape, according to newspaper Fazhi Wanbao.
In 1996, Qoγsiletu, a young Mongolian Chinese man, was arrested after reporting to police in Hohhot that he had found a dead body in a public toilet. The police questioned why he was in a woman’s toilet to discover a corpse and soon charged him with her rape and murder.
Qoγsiletu was reported to have told the court that he was drunk at the time and had ended up in the woman’s toilet by mistake. Yet his defence was in vain, and he received the death penalty two months later.
It took the police ten years to realise that Qoγsiletu was wronged. In 2006, they arrested a serial killer and rapist who confessed to murdering a woman in a Hohhot a toilet in 1996 – and gave details of the crime scene that proved him to be the real culprit.
Chinese media reports showed that Qoγsiletu was arrested amid a nationwide crackdown on crime launched by the government. The guiding principal behind the campaign was to solve criminal cases quickly and punish offenders severely. Thus police involved in Qovsiletu’s case did not conduct a thorough investigation and instead rushed to a conclusion.
Qoγsiletu’s family spent years petitioning for their son after the truth came to light, but there is yet a formal reponse from the local government.
"The media has reported on the retrial of our son's case. Our petition efforts in nine years are not in vain, and we hope justice will be served." Qoγsiletu's parents wrote on a newly opened weibo account on Friday afternoon
Qoγsiletu is one of many such cases where innocent people have been executed for crimes they did not commit.
Another notable case was that of Nie Shubin, a young man from Hebei, who was sentenced to death for the murder and rape a year earlier than Qovsiletu.
Despite a man named Wang Shujin admitting to be the real perpetrator in 2005, Hebei’s supreme court still upheld their original verdict last year, as it considered Wang's testimony not consistent with findings at the crime scene.
Following a number of well-publicised, wrongful convictions, China’s Supreme Court starteted to review capital cases before sentences were carried out in 2007.
Judges and scholars close to the Supreme Court say capital punishments have probabaly been reduced “by more than one third” since then, as the Supreme Court is now more inclined to deal with death sentences by offering reprieves, and demanding “clear facts” and “abundant evidence” for capital punishments, according to a recent report by the Southern Weekly.
In June, China’s Supreme Court overturned the death sentence of a woman who killed and cooked her husband after suffering years of domestic abuse.
The total number of death penalty cases in China is classified as a state secret. San Francisco-based human rights group Dui Hua Foundation estimates that China executed around 2,400 people last year, based on published sentences.
Source: South China Morning Post, October 31, 2014