Man acquitted, freed after years in custody
Print Edition
A former murder suspect in northeast China’s Jilin Province regained freedom yesterday after he was in police custody for more than seven years.
Yong Kuikui, 35, a farmer from Siping City, who was suspected of murdering an old woman in 2008, was acquitted by the Jilin Provincial Higher People’s Court yesterday when China observed its second national Constitution Day.
A 74-year-old fruit vendor was found dead at her fruit store in the city of Tonghua on January 19, 2008, with scattered oranges indicating that a struggle took place.
Police investigations showed that Yong had a quarrel with the woman on that day and his fingerprints were found on a plastic bag filled with oranges in a building near the store.
Yong was arrested on March 5, 2008 at his home in Siping. Over the past seven years, the city’s intermediate people’s court sentenced him to death for the crime of robbery and sentenced him to death with a two-year suspension twice for intentional homicide in July 2009 and in October 2014, respectively.
The Jilin Provincial Higher People’s Court had remanded the case back for new trials two times and eventually acquitted the suspect on the grounds of “lacking sufficient evidence.”
The court also suggested it seemed as though he had been forced to confess after the interrogation footage showed he suffered facial injuries, so his testimony was not admissible.
China is making greater effort to ensure citizens’ rights to impartial trial to promote judicial fairness, justice and human rights.
In June, the government released a white paper highlighting improvement in judicial justice and transparency thanks to judicial reforms.
It said courts nationwide re-heard 1,317 cases and corrected a number of wrongful convictions in 2014.
One high-profile wrongful conviction involved a rape-murder case in 1996 by an Inner Mongolian court, in which an 18-year-old man named Huugjilt was convicted and executed.
In December 2014, 18 years later, he was posthumously acquitted of the crimes, and his parents received state compensation of more than 2 million yuan (US$312,000).
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