Abstract
At around 5 pm on 5th August 1994, a woman by the surname of Kang, who worked at a hydraulic parts factory in Shijiazhuang, Hebei province, was raped and murdered in a cornfield by the side of a road in the outskirts of the city. Based on tips from the public, police identified Nie Shubin as a suspect, and obtained a confession to the crime. On 15th March 1995, the Shijiazhuang Intermediate Court found the defendant Nie Shubin guilty of premeditated murder and sentenced him to death. They also found him guilty of rape and sentenced him to fifteen years in prison for that crime, with the primary evidence being his confession. On 25th April the High Provincial People’s Court of Hebei released its final verdict approving the death sentence and two days later Nie Shubin was executed.
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Notes
- 1.
See Zhao (2007).
- 2.
See Zhao (2009).
- 3.
See Zhou (2005).
- 4.
See a news report by Lei Hongtao, Legal Weekly, 26 June 2013.
- 5.
See Zhang (2013).
- 6.
See Li (2013).
- 7.
See news report, ‘Court’s transparency in trial welcomed’, China Daily, 30 April 2015.
- 8.
See He (2017).
- 9.
See He and He (2012).
- 10.
I mentioned this case in Chap. 1.
- 11.
I mentioned this case in Chap. 9.
- 12.
Zhao Zuohai was sentenced to death with two-year suspension in a murder case in Henan in 1999, and exonerated in 2010. See He (2016, pp. 149–151).
- 13.
See Liu (2009, pp. 364–367).
- 14.
Professor Godsey is Director of the Ohio Innocence Project. The statement quoted above comes from his answers to the question of this author regarding to the standard for proving a wrongful conviction in the USA in July 2010.
- 15.
On 4 February 1991, McClendon agreed to the suggestion of the prosecution that he should undergo a lie-detection test, and further that the results of the test could be admitted as evidence in court. The test was administered by a specialist for the Ohio Highway Patrol, who noted in the results that McClendon “might possibly have deliberately lied” in his answers to relevant questions.
- 16.
According to Professor Godsey the prosecution later found the actual perpetrator of the crime by searching a nation-wide digital DNA evidence archive, but since the victim did not want to be involved the prosecutor was not able to file any new proceedings. This case narrative is based on an account in the article headlined, ‘Hello freedom’, published in The Columbus Dispatch, 12 August 2008.
- 17.
An account of this case is found on the ‘Know the Cases’ section on the Innocence Project website www.innocenceproject.org/know.
- 18.
See Thompson (2008).
- 19.
This data comes from the website of the Innocence Project, on the column entitled “Eyewitness Identification Reform.” www.innocenceproject.org/fix/Eyewitness-Identification.
- 20.
Because wrongful criminal conviction determination reveals slips in the system of identification, the American states are constantly improving the rules for identification, as in the establishment of “double blind” identification rules, meaning the person organizing the identification activity also does not know which person in the lineup is the suspect; also, the person making the identification is informed that the perpetrator of the crime may not be among those in the lineup.
- 21.
See McConville and Wilson (2003, pp. 464–467).
- 22.
Ibid, pp. 459–461.
- 23.
In October 2009, the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom was established, replacing the House of Lords Committee as Britain’s final court of appeal and independent of both Parliament and other law enforcement agencies. The UK Supreme Court consisted of twelve judges. For civil suits, the Supreme Court accepts appeals from all regions within the United Kingdom; for criminal cases, it accepts cases from England, Wales, and Northern Ireland (but not Scotland). The conditions for accepting a case are generally controversial legal issues important to the public interest.
- 24.
Based on ‘Murder convictions ruled unsafe’, BBC News, 15 February 2007.
- 25.
The Supreme Court examined the cases of McCartney and MacDermott and of another claimant, Andrew Adams at the same time, but unanimously rejected the request made by Adams, noting that a reasonable jury might still convict Adams even with the new evidence. Adams, who had been declared guilty in 1993 of murdering retired teacher Jack Royal, had by served fourteen years of his sentence by 2007, when an appeals court canceled his guilty verdict and declared him not guilty. He applied for government compensation. His application was rejected by a high court, but he appealed and the application was examined by the Supreme Court. See ‘UK court sets new standard on compensation for wrongful convictions’, Associated Press, 11 May 2011. See also ‘Two men jailed for murder can seek compensation’, The Irish Times, 12 May 2011.
- 26.
See ‘Supreme Court allows miscarriage of justice appeals’, BBC News, 11 May 2011.
- 27.
Ibid.
- 28.
English translation of this book title is: Sources of Errors in Criminal Proceedings: A Study of Cases of Successful Petitions of Revision in the Federal Republic of Germany.
- 29.
In the summer of 2010, this author traveled to Germany to serve as a visiting scholar at the Max Planck Institute for Foreign and International Criminal Law. While there, I spoke with German scholars and judges to learn about the state of wrongful conviction cases in Germany. These texts were translated by Zhou Zunyou, a doctoral student then at the Max Planck Institute.
- 30.
See Zhou (2011).
- 31.
I introduced this case in Chap. 6.
- 32.
I mentioned this case in Chap. 1.
References
He, Jiahong. 2016. Back from the Dead: Wrongful Convictions and Criminal Justice in China. Honolulu: University of Hawai’I Press.
He, Jiahong. 2017. Rethinking on the Nie Shubin Case. Theoretical Horizon 2017(1): 42–47.
He, Jiahong, and Ran He. 2012. Empirical studies of Wrongful Convictions in Mainland China. University of Cincinnati Law Review 80 (4): 1277–1292.
Li, Xianfeng. 2013. Final verdict: Wang Shujin is not the true perpetrator in the Nie Shubin Case. Jinghua Times, Sept 28.
Liu, Pinxin (ed.). 2009. Criminal Wrongful Conviction: Factors and Strategies. Beijing: China Legal Publishing House.
McConville, Mike, and Geoffrey Wilson. 2003. English Criminal Justice Process. Translated by Yao Yongji and others. Beijing: Law Press.
Thompson, S.G. 2008. Beyond a Reasonable Doubt? Reconsidering Uncorroborated Eyewitness Identification Testimony. UC Davis Law Review 41: 1487–1545.
Zhang, Jian. 2013. The four groups of prosecution evidence prove that Wang Shujin is not the true perpetrator. Jinghua Times, July 11.
Zhao, Ling. 2007. A culprit with a conscience and court without: Nie Shubin’s wrongful conviction. Southern Weekend, Nov 2.
Zhao, Ling. 2009. Uncertain prospects for overturning the Nie Shubin case. Southern Weekend, Nov 11.
Zhou, Xifeng. 2005. Wang Shujin, madman. Xiaoxiang Morning News, March 7.
Zhou, Zunyou. 2011. ‘How Does Germany Rectify Wrongful Conviction?’ Evidence Law Forum, 16, 240–269. Beijing: Law Press.
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He, J. (2018). The Proof of Wrongful Convictions. In: Methodology of Judicial Proof and Presumption. Masterpieces of Contemporary Jurisprudents in China. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-8025-8_12
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