Suspect spends 10 years in jail but still no verdict because of "unclear facts"
Print Edition
A MURDER suspect has spent 10 years in detention in Shangqiu City, central China’s Henan Province, because local courts have not been able to deliver a final verdict due to “unclear facts,” Chengdu Business News reported.
Yang Botao was handed a suspended death sentence for killing and dismembering the then 22-year-old Li Yueying in August 2001 by the Shangqiu Intermediate People’s Court in September 2005.
The 37-year-old filed an appeal, claiming he had been tortured by police to make a confession. “They kept me in a hotel room for 17 days. I was tortured, so that I had hallucinations. I felt like my soul was flying to another place,” according to his appeal.
His lawyer Shen Xiangfeng insisted that Yang’s finger and foot prints and his vehicle traces could not have been found where Li’s body parts were recovered.
Between 2006 and 2009, the Henan Higher People’s Court overturned the ruling three times because “facts were unclear” while the local court insisted Yang was guilty after two retrials. In August 2013, Shangqiu prosecutors dropped the case due to lack of evidence, the newspaper reported.
Wang Lihua, the city’s deputy chief prosecutor, confirmed that files and documents have been transferred to police for supplementary investigation. But Zhang Dayong, publicity director with the Shangqiu Public Security Bureau, denied this.
“The case is still with the prosecutors,” Zhang said. “If prosecutors ask for a supplementary investigation, I don’t know what we can do.”
Now, Yang is still not free, the newspaper reported.
Shen said the decade-long detention has taken its toll on Yang who has become extremely thin and irritable. His family has used all of their savings after paying more than 200 visits to authorities in Beijing to demand justice, said Ma Jiangbo, Yang’s brother-in-law.
The long-pending verdict has also affected Li’s family. “Her mother has gone mad. She cries every night,” said her father Li Benxiu. The mother suffered a heart attack on February 5 and is now undergoing treatment.
Li’s body parts, her head and leg were first found by a rag-picker from a garbage dump outside a residential building in Shangqiu on August 16, 2001. Two days later, a local farmer found her arms in a cornfield, the newspaper reported. Her identity was confirmed after a DNA test in December 2003.
Police first questioned Yang in September 2001 after coming to know that his sister, Li’s classmate in middle school, had agreed for Li to stay with her and asked her brother Yang to accompany her to the room.
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