China Wrongful Convictions Case Archive
USALI researchers have collected and documented selected wrongful conviction cases in China with the aim of providing the first English-language case archive for people interested in learning about how wrongful convictions are redressed in China. Through the lens of these cases, we can see the evolution of the Chinese criminal justice system.
Exonerations of wrongful convictions in China have gained momentum since 2013, when a high-level Communist Party committee issued a policy document acknowledging the issue for the first time. Further support came in 2014 when the Fourth Plenum of the 18th Party Congress issued a detailed legal reform agenda that included putting in place “effective measures” to prevent unjust, false, and wrongly decided cases, and as well as mechanisms for prompt correction. While these measures and mechanisms remain a work in progress, the two party documents have made it politically more acceptable to pursue justice in wrongful conviction cases.
From publicly available sources, we have identified more than 170 convictions that have been overturned, either through appeal or retrial, on the basis of a court finding of actual innocence or insufficient evidence to convict. We are focused on the period after 1979, when China enacted its post-Mao Criminal Law and Criminal Procedure Law. Some cases were appealed and retried several times over the course of many years. In other cases, the convicted person’s family spent years petitioning authorities outside of court in an effort to start the process of retrial. In almost every case in our collection, the convicted person was kept in custody throughout the entire process until achieving exoneration, for as long as 29 years. We continue to gather more information about these and other cases, and plan to gradually add more of them to this archive.
Our information comes from publicly available court judgments, news reports, and the social media accounts of defendants or their families. For each case, we cross-checked multiple sources and compiled a case profile. Each profile contains the defendant's name, criminal charge, procedural history, major factors that produced the wrongful conviction, and how the conviction was overturned.
This is a work in progress. Our goal is to provide insights into how wrongful convictions occur and are redressed within China’s criminal justice system. These cases also serve to illustrate the dynamic nature of the system, and how changes in the formal law and informal norms of justice are playing out in society. Please email usali.nyu@gmail.com with your comments and suggestions.
— China Wrongful Convictions Case Archive Project Lead Chi Yin