Chinese mother of man wrongfully executed over rape and murder gets 2.7m yuan payout

Nie Shubin

The mother of a 20-year-old man who was wrongly executed for rape and murder more than two decades ago will receive about 2.7 million yuan (US$391,000 or HK$3.04 million) in compensation, including a record 1.3 million yuan for emotional damages, local media reported.

The amount is far less than the 13.9 million yuan demanded by the family of Nie Shubin.

He was taken into custody shortly after police found the body of Kang Juhua in Shijiazhuang in Hebei province in 1994.

Nie confessed during police questioning and was tried and executed the next year, at the age of 21. In December, the Supreme People’s Court overturned the verdict, citing a lack of evidence and questions over the authenticity of his confession.

Nie’s mother, Zhang Huanzhi, said she would not appeal against the compensation award handed down by the province’s highest court, according to Shanghai-based online news outlet Thepaper.cn.

The case has been widely considered one of the mainland’s most notorious wrongful executions.

Citizens and legal scholars alike said it exposed deep flaws in the criminal justice system.

More than a decade after Nie was executed by gunshot, a man arrested for another crime, Wang Shujin, confessed to killing Kang.

The lump sum paid by the government consists of 1.3 million yuan for emotional damage, 1.26 million yuan for his death and burial cost and 52,000 yuan for infringement of personal freedom. The sum also includes one-off financial aid to the victim’s mother, which amounts 64,000 yuan.

The family’s demand for financial payment in relation to the rehabilitation of their name was denied, however, as the court deemed its public apology sufficient, Thepaper.cn reported.

The compensation for emotional damage was the highest yet awarded in China to families of victims of a miscarriage of justice, the report said.

The previous record was one million yuan, which was given to the parents of another young man named Huugjilt, who was also wrongly executed for rape and murder at the age of 18.

Huugjilt was similarly convicted following a confession while in custody and executed shortly after in 1996. A serial murderer and rapist confessed years later to the crimes.

Source: South China Morning Post, March 31, 2017

Parents of man found innocent 21 years after being executed receive 2.68 million yuan in compensation

Nie Shubin's parents

The parents of man who was executed 21 years ago only to be found not guilty of rape and murder late last year have been awarded 2.68 million yuan ($388,000) in compensation by the Higher People's Court in Hebei Province.

Originally, they had asked for 14 million yuan ($2 million).

The compensation included 1.3 million yuan for emotional damage caused to Nie's parents, a record high sum. It also included 1.26 million yuan for his death and burial cost, along with 52,000 yuan for infringement of personal freedom and 64,000 yuan for financial aid to Nie's mother who said that she will not appeal the court's decision.

For Nie's family, the road to vindication has been a long one.

Last December, the Supreme People's Court (SPC) admitted that flaws in the Chinese justice system had led to the wrongful conviction of Nie, who was found guilty in 1995 of raping and murdering a Shijiazhuang woman.

The SPC overturned the conviction after finding that several legal violations had been committed during Nie's trial. They included insufficient evidence, lost documents, and a confession found to be inadmissible because it was gained through torture, along with the fact that key details like time and cause of death had not been confirmed by the prosecution.

Back in 2005, it became apparent that there was something not right about Nie's case after a man named Wang Shujin admitted to committing the crimes for which Nie was found guilty.

Unfortunately, a special investigation into Nie's case by Liu Jinguo, who had served as head of the party's provincial Political and Legal Affairs Committee at the time, stalled when Liu was promoted to another department.

Huugjilt's parents

It took almost ten years of constant petitioning before Nie's parents were given another opportunity to vindicate their son. But even after the SPC assigned the case to a Shandong court for review in 2014, it wasn't until this past June that the SPC finally decided to reopen Nie's case.

The extremely long time it took for China's courts to find Nie innocent pales in comparison to the time it took them to punish him. Just a month after his conviction, 21-year-old Nie was executed.

Nie's story is strikingly similar to that of an Inner Mongolian man named Hugjiltu.

Two years ago, Hugijiltu was found innocent of rape and murder charges that he was convicted of 18 years before.

Unfortunately, just like Nie, Hugjiltu had been swiftly punished for his crime, being executed just two months after his trial. He was 18 years old at the time.

One month after Hugjiltu's conviction was overturned, his parents were awarded with state compensation -- amounting to just 2.06 million yuan.

Source: Shangaiist, Alex Linder, March 31, 2017

⚑ | Report an error, an omission, a typo; suggest a story or a new angle to an existing story; submit a piece, a comment; recommend a resource; contact the webmaster, contact us: deathpenaltynews@gmail.com.

Opposed to Capital Punishment? Help us keep this blog up and running! DONATE!

Comments

USA | What happens in the final weeks before an execution? These reporters were inside the room.

The journalists behind ‘The Last 12 Weeks’ earned extraordinary access to a death penalty defense team—and faced difficult ethical choices Many defense lawyers are naturally cagey. They work in a pressure cooker, protecting their clients’ rights while fighting for the best possible outcome. And arguably, the stakes can’t get any higher than trying to save a client’s life. So no, defense lawyers don’t usually invite journalists into strategy meetings. But that’s what happened when Marshall Project reporter Maurice Chammah and Serial Productions senior producer Alvin Melathe spent the final few months before a Texas execution embedded with a capital defense team.

North Korea | 'I was only 9': North Korean defector recalls childhood memory of public execution

Kim Eun-joo was 9 years old when her teacher stopped their lesson and told the class to follow her outside. The children were marched to a public execution ground in North Korea. “I would cry even when our family dog died,” Kim said in a recent interview with The Korea Times. “But the first time I watched humans killing a human, I had no words for what I was feeling. It was the most brutal scene I have ever seen, in any movie or in real life.” The memory has stayed with her ever since. Now a human rights advocate after defecting from North Korea, Kim recently brought that childhood scene to the 9th World Congress Against the Death Penalty in Paris, where North Korea’s use of public executions and capital punishment was officially placed on the agenda for the first time.

19 July 1943 | Auschwitz's Largest Public Hanging: 12 Polish Prisoners Executed in Escape Reprisal

OSWIECIM, Poland — The SS carried out the largest public hanging in Auschwitz history on July 19, 1943, executing 12 Polish prisoners before other inmates as collective punishment for escapes and civilian contacts. The victims, all from the camp’s surveyors’ labor unit, were hanged on gallows built in front of the camp kitchen during an Auschwitz I roll call. The SS orchestrated this reprisal following prisoner escapes from the surveyors’ detail and unauthorized communication between inmates and civilians. Camp authorities used the recent escapes as a pretext to impose collective punishment.

Texas: The inmates who refused to die quietly and had to be gassed out of their cells before execution

Former crime reporter Michelle Lyons, who witnessed nearly 300 executions in Texas, US, reveals the desperate acts of death row prisoners who refused to accept their fate After spending years or often decades locked up in a tiny cell for 23 hours a day, most Death Row inmates go willingly to their executions. However, some refuse to die quietly - with officers forced to gas them out of cells, strap up their heads and even give chase across prison grounds. Michelle Lyons, who has witnessed nearly 300 executions in Texas, US, exclusively tells Sun Online how certain inmates "fight like hell" in their last moments. On most occasions, Michelle watched from the witness area, with the killers already on the gurney - the stretcher where they'd be given a lethal injection. Seven prisoners once tried to escape from the Row in Huntsville - with one shoving magazines and newspapers under his clothes to help him roll over razor-wire fences. Others have had to b...

Japan: Capital punishment for a minor

Death chamber at Tokyo Detention Center The Supreme Court's recent decision to uphold the death sentence given in a lay judge trial to a 24-year-old man for murders he committed when he was a minor raises questions about the lay judge trial system and capital punishment. These include whether the lay judges correctly understood the spirit of the Juvenile Law in sentencing the defendant to death. It was the 1st death sentence handed down on a minor in a lay judge trial. The murders took place in Ishinomaki, Miyagi Prefecture, in 2010 when Yutaro Chiba was 18 - meaning he fell under the purview of the Juvenile Law. Chiba was convicted of entering his ex-girlfriend's house and stabbing to death the girl's sister and a female friend of the girl with a butcher knife, seriously injuring a male friend of the sister and abducting the girl. Prosecutors said Chiba killed the victims because they were trying to separate him and his former girlfriend. Since Chiba pleaded n...

Former Florida cop to be executed on same day as 80-year-old Pasco man

In an unprecedented move in the modern history of capital punishment, Gov. Ron DeSantis on Tuesday cleared the way for 2 executions to occur on the same day. DeSantis reset the execution of James Duckett, whose execution earlier this year was stayed amid efforts to secure DNA testing and analysis of evidence in his case. Duckett’s execution was reset for July 28. That is the same day previously set for the execution of Dominick Occhicone. Court records indicate that Duckett’s execution is scheduled for noon. Occhicone’s is set to follow at 6 p.m.

Idaho | Death row prisoners sue over state's new firing squad

BOISE (Idaho Statesman) – Days after Idaho made the switch to a firing squad for executions, two Idaho death row prisoners next in line to be put to death sued the state prison system, saying its director withheld information about how she settled on the specifics for carrying out the method. Attorneys for prisoners Thomas Creech and Gerald Pizzuto filed suit this week in state district court against Idaho Department of Correction Director Bree Derrick. In the filing, they called her approval of an updated standard operating procedure for the firing squad and lethal injection as a backup method “arbitrary, capricious, or an abuse of discretion and in excess of the statutory authority of the agency.”

Florida executes Dennis Sochor

Man, 74, becomes oldest inmate executed in Florida in state’s 10th lethal injection this year Florida put to death one of its oldest prisoners in its history on Tuesday, a 74-year-old convicted murderer who was 1 of 3 older inmates scheduled for execution within the span of a month in the nation’s busiest death penalty state. Dennis Sochor was pronounced dead at 6:16 p.m. following a 3-drug injection at Florida State Prison near Starke, the office of Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis said. He was convicted of killing a woman on Jan. 1, 1982, just hours after meeting her at a New Year’s Eve party.

Florida | Former warden recalls botched electrocution that left him battling PTSD for 13 years and turned him into an abolitionist

Ron McAndrew anticipated it would be just another standard execution. He had been assigned to carry out the death of Cuban refugee Pedro Medina via electric chair within the confines of Florida State Prison. Fifteen years had passed since Medina's conviction for the murder of 52-year-old Dorothy James, and McAndrew's responsibility was to oversee the administration of lethal electrical currents to his brain. Having already supervised two previous executions using the identical procedure and raised in a community that strongly supported capital punishment, he expected a swift conclusion with justice delivered.

Oldest inmate set to be executed in Florida will face strict spending limit for final meal

An entire category of food is also off-limits for final meal requests in Florida Florida is currently preparing to execute its oldest inmate later today (July 14), a 74-year-old convicted murderer who has been on death row since the 1980s—but his final meal will be limited by a strict budget. Dennis Sochor is scheduled to be put to death later today, making history as the oldest inmate to ever be executed in the state. The criminal, who has been on death row for nearly 40 years, will be administered the lethal three-drug injection, with the process due to begin at around 6pm.

Death Penalty News

Search This Blog