Supreme People's Court judge urges end to wrongful convictions
One of China's most senior judges has called for an end to miscarriages of justice by the nation's courts after two cases of wrongful convictions have highlighted inadequacies in its legal system.
The paper is the court's official mouthpiece.
It's preferable to release someone wrongfully, than convict someone wrongfully. If a true criminal is released, heaven will not collapse, but if an unlucky citizen is wrongfully convicted, heaven will fall
"It's preferable to release someone wrongfully, than convict someone wrongfully," he said. "If a true criminal is released, heaven will not collapse, but if an unlucky citizen is wrongfully convicted, heaven will fall."
Criminal trials in China had a conviction rate of 99.9 per cent in 2009, according to the latest China Law Yearbook. In recent months, several murder cases have raised public ire against the judicial system.
Zhejiang's provincial supreme court on March 26 overturned a decade-old death sentence with two-year reprieve and a 15-year prison sentence for two men convicted on murder charges for killing a woman in Hangzhou.
"Wrongful convictions are often the result of given orders, an abandonment of principles or sloppy dereliction of duty," Shen wrote on Monday. If these things happen in the West, he argues, "the professional stigma cannot be washed away in a lifetime".
Shen called for more respect of the judicial process, better training of legal practitioners and more transparency in the judicial review process. Chinese judges "face intervention and pressure from all sides", he wrote, which give them little leeway to rule independently.
Shen's article "is a good statement", said Teng Biao, a law lecturer at the China University of Politics and Law in Beijing. "It's progress."
But Teng cautioned: "These are likely to be just personal views. Even if the courts are changing, they remain restrained by public security organs and the [Communist Party's] Politics and Law Committees."
Shen, 61, gained prominence when he was parachuted to Shanghai to preside over the corruption investigation on the city's party secretary, Chen Liangyu, who was later sentenced to 18 years in jail for bribery and abuse of power.
His comments come almost two months into Zhou Qiang's tenure as president of the Supreme People's Court. Unlike his predecessor, Zhou has a university degree in civil law and worked in the Ministry of Justice before scaling the party's echelons of power.
