Currently China not only convicts 99.9% of its suspects but it also hands out the death sentence more prolifically than every other legal system in the world combined. While this is a shocking statistic the most important question here is why such a high percentage of suspects are convicted. Either China's police force is made up almost entirely of Sherlock level detectives, or, possibly more credibly, there is something at play here that's heavily skewing the system in favour of the prosecution. It has been claimed that wrongful conviction, tat may be responsible for the absurdly high figure, could be due to given orders and sloppy police work. However China hardly stands alone in suffering from this unprofessional conduct within its judicial system. What really makes the difference in my opinion is the massive credibility given to forced confessions (a slight euphemism for torture until they confess), and the fact the police, who are invariably prosecuting, have complete control of the evidence.
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This becomes an un-fightable one-two punch against the defence once you realise that the defence is not entitled to any of the crime scene evidence. The prosecution can pick and choose evidence that supports their case, making an objective approach to understanding what happened at a crime scene impossible.
Imagine for example that investigators discover a woman dead in her home due to assault with a blunt instrument. They discover blood spatter from repeated attacks suggesting a man roughly the height of the husband, however the spatter suggests left handed swings when the husband was right handed and also that the only blood on the husbands clothes has large fragments of clots in it, so must be from hours after the crime. Now the police can't find another suspect apart from the husband so they build a case against him. They can simply include that blood is concordant with a man his height and the wife's blood was found on his clothes, leaving out the considerable evidence against their case. Obviously this makes defending near impossible.
Luckily China is beginning to address the issue, due to mounting internal and external pressure on its judicial system. A recent example of this is the case of Nian Bin in which a grocery store owner was accused of murdering his neighbours by poisoning their porridge with rat poison. The police managed to extract a confession from Nian Bin by torture. Nian was convicted and sentenced to death. However in a series of legal battles, with his sister leading the defence with the aid of a former judge, many holes in the prosecutions argument where uncovered. For example, the man who the police claimed had sold Nian the poison not only looked nothing like Nian's description of him but also did not even sell the type of poison the toxicology report claimed had been used. Also while Nian confessed to having laced the kettle used to boil water for porridge with the poison, not everyone who ate the poison fell sick, whereas everyone who ate the squid did.
Possibly the most damning thing however was that around 11 minutes into the interrogation video the camera angle shifts, and Nian suddenly appears to be on the verge of crying, and immediately begins to confess to murders, where he had been silent and unresponsive before. Logs of the interrogation found by the former judge suggested a 2 hour gap around this time in which the interrogators had tortured Nian, and allegedly threatened to torture his wife.
While the highly successful defence team, built upon Chinese lawyers who saw the failure of the current judicial system, they only managed to win Nian retrial after retrial. Judges, lawyers and police hate having cases overturned. It reflects very badly on them, and will destroy their reputation as well as make any promotion much more difficult, and as the retrials are usually conducted in the same court the judge and prosecutors are likely to be those involved in the original case. Nian received four death sentences, and may never have been exonerated (making it into the lucky 0.1%) if it weren't for the fact that recently the Chinese legal system has been heavily embarrassed by having to throw out a murder conviction after the supposed victim reappeared alive over a decade later (Zhang Aiquing, 1994), a case in which confession extracted by torture had been pivotal.
Cases like this had lead to a revision of the Chinese criminal procedure which allowed the defence team to question the police in court as well as call in their own expert witnesses. One of these expert witnesses happened to be a forensic scientist from Hong Kong, who noticed that the spectrometer slides of the victim's blood were in fact all from the same sample, just with different labels. As if this wasn't bad enough, the conclusions of the report had been written before the results came through, showing that the police had likely forged the results to fit their case.
This lead to one of the first repealed death sentences in the Chinese judicial system not based on supposedly dead people reappearing alive, or on incontrovertible DNA evidence, but rather on good forensic science and a logical argument.
While some may see this as a depiction of the corruption and failure of the system, I think it can also be seen as cause for hope. It shows that with enough perseverance logic and evidence are starting to have a place in the Chinese courts, and in addition it shows that many of those high up in the Chinese legal system, for example the former Lawyer who aided the defence as well as many lawyers who aided pro bone, are willing to fight against corruption. In fact Shen Deyong, one of china's most senior judges recently called for more respect for the legal system from those within it. In his words:
"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."
While I'm not sure how much I agree with this I think it's indicative of general movement of those within the Chinese Judicial system in the right direction. It's something that will hopefully lead to a decrease in the illogical and often barbaric nature of many investigations and possibly result in a less bloody court in general.
Thanks for reading! Until next time, over and out!
