Jiang on Wrongful Conviction Death Penalty Cases in China

 

The problem of wrongful conviction has become more widely acknowledged in China today. At the Third Session of the Twelfth National People's Congress held in March 2015, Zhou Qiang, chief justice of the Supreme People's Court, stated that they "feel a deep sense of self-blame for wrongful convictions." He demanded that courts at all levels "draw a profound lesson [and] improve the mechanisms for effectively preventing and correcting wrongful convictions." In the year of 2014, according to Zhou, Chinese courts had revised 1317 criminal cases, among which there were "a batch of major wrongful conviction cases"; Zhou then promised that they would "be responsible to the people and correct every single wrongful conviction case once it is found out." However, in judicial practice, for an individual to get a wrongful conviction corrected may not become any easier- drawing on a study of the Leping case of injustice, in which four defendants were convicted of rape and murder and sentenced to death for a crime they had not committed, this article discusses how the efforts of correcting it meet a deadlock in China's judicial system, and how, in this circumstance, Chinese civil society initiates and runs a network advocacy aiming at breaking the deadlock and advancing the correction.

The first section briefly describes the Leping case, illustrating how strong incentives to use torture remain in China's criminal justice system and how laws to curb its use can be circumvented and subverted, in this case even in the face of inter-departmental contention about using evidence obtained under torture. This helps to understand obstacles of official efforts to reduce or eradicate torture through legislative reforms and other top-down measures. 

As analysed in the second section, the roots of torture, including the structure of the Public Security Bureau, the People's Procuratorate, the People's Court as an "iron triangle," in which the Public Security Bureau possesses overwhelming power and outranks the other two institutions, and the various political tasks such as "cracking all homicide cases (ming'an bipo)" imposed on the police, are necessary for the Chinese authorities to implement and reinforce the utilitarianism, which embeds that suspects/defendants/criminals are "bad" or "evil" and should be "wiped out" by the authorities for the purpose of maintaining "public order" and "public interest." The utilitarianism serves for the ideological foundation of the authoritarian rule. Since the roots of torture, namely the "rightfulness" and "almightiness" of public power, are crucial for utilitarianism, it is hard to reckon on the authorities to address them; in turn, the utilitarianism also provides justification for the use of torture. In this context, correction of wrongful conviction cases could be understood as the authorities' selective response - as shown in the Leping case of injustice, even though the "true perpetrator" has admitted guilt, the judicial system still turns a blind eye to the appeal of retrying and correcting it. Against this background, a group of people including lawyers, rights activists, videographers, and netizens collaborated to challenge the four defendants' wrongful conviction and draw the attention of the general public to the plight of the incarcerated defendants and their families, making use of diverse verbal and visual advocacy tools including the legal process, the social media, and independent documentary film. The last section traces these advocates' efforts based on legal documents, empirical observations, media reports, online discussions and audio-visual materials, and argues that beyond documenting the torture of the suspects/defendants and advocating for correction of individual cases, the grassroots efforts have been part of an increasingly resilient socio-political network opposing the abuse of public power. Entailing long-term objectives such as abolishing the death penalty and promoting civic consciousness in China, this network advocacy also constitutes a significant challenge to the utilitarianism and the Party-state's authoritarian rule.

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Jiang on Wrongful Conviction Death Penalty Cases in China curated from CrimProf Blog