The Defendant/Exoneree
Liu Zhonglin (刘忠林) was born in December 1968. He was twenty-two years old when he was first detained and fifty years old when exonerated.
Facts
On August 8, 1989, a nineteen-year-old woman named Zheng Dianrong (“Zheng”) and her 16-year-old niece left home together in Huimin Village in Dongliao County, Liaoyuan City, Jilin Province. Some time later, the niece, who was deaf and mute, returned home alone and used gestures to tell the family that she saw Zheng being abducted by two masked individuals on bicycles. The family searched for Zheng in vain.
On October 28, 1990, residents of Huimin found a woman’s body while digging in a cabbage patch. It was identified as Zheng. According to the autopsy report, Zheng had been hit on the head with a blunt object and then buried; she died from a combination of brain injuries and asphyxiation. The autopsy report also determined that Zheng, who was not married, was approximately twenty to twenty-one weeks pregnant at the time of her death.
According to the police case resolution report from the Dongliao County Public Security Bureau, after Zheng’s body was found, police assumed that she was killed by her romantic partner. They identified a fellow villager, Liu Zhonglin (“Liu”), as a prime suspect because several villagers said Liu told them that he had a romantic relationship with Zheng and had gotten her pregnant. The villagers presented no evidence to substantiate their accounts.
Liu initially denied having a relationship with Zheng or killing her. However, he changed his statement the next day and confessed that he had gotten Zheng pregnant and urged her to have an abortion. Liu said that when Zheng refused, he murdered her for fear that her family would blame him for her pregnancy. Liu later recanted and insisted that he was never in a relationship with Zheng.
Procedural History
On October 29, 1990, Liu was summoned to the Dongliao County Public Security Bureau for interrogation.
On October 30, 1990, Liu was formally detained for investigation, and on November 8, he was formally arrested.
On January 24, 1991, the Liaoyuan City People’s Procuratorate returned the case to the Dongliao County Public Security Bureau for further investigation, saying that the evidence was insufficient and the confessions the defendant made were inconsistent. DNA testing was not widely available in China at that time, so police were not able to determine if Liu fathered the fetus, nor had they found any evidence linking Liu to Zheng’s pregnancy (other than the allegations of a few villagers) or to her death. During the period when the police conducted a supplementary investigation, Liu was interrogated twice. He recanted his confession the first time but confessed again the second time.
On May 3, 1994, the procuratorate indicted Liu on charges of intentional homicide and filed the case with the Liaoyuan City Intermediate Court (“Intermediate Court”).
On July 11, 1994, the Intermediate Court convicted Liu of intentional homicide and sentenced him to death with a two-year reprieve and a lifelong deprivation of political rights. This sentence means that if the offender does not commit any new crime during the two-year period, his death sentence will be commuted to life in prison. The original verdict is not available on the court database but a photo of the verdict can be found here.
Liu attempted to file an appeal within the statutory time limit. However, because he had only a primary school education and did not have a lawyer, he was unable to prepare a written appeal. He told the court orally when he was sentenced that he wanted to appeal. A case handler at the Jilin Province High People’s Court (“Jilin High Court”) said later that they could not assign a case number without a written petition. As a result, Liu was not given a second-instance trial.
On August 8, 1995, the Jilin High Court approved the sentence of death with a two-year reprieve. After two years, Liu’s death sentence was commuted to a life sentence.
In early 2010, Liu petitioned the Jilin High Court for a retrial. On March 28, 2012, the Jilin High Court ordered a retrial.
Liu participated in prison labor and was granted four sentence reductions. On January 22, 2016, he was released from prison.
On April 25, 2016, the Jilin High Court appointed a collegiate panel and held a closed-door retrial hearing. It made no more announcements for two years.
On April 12, 2018, the Jilin High Court vacated Liu’s conviction due to insufficient evidence. It announced the verdict on April 20, 2018. The retrial verdict is not available in the court’s database but a photo of the retrial verdict can be found here.
Date of the Conviction
July 11, 1994
Date the Wrongful Conviction Was Vacated/Reversed
April 12, 2018
Number of Days in Incarceration
9,217 days
Why Was the Case Reopened/Reversed
During Liu’s imprisonment, his cousin’s husband, Wang Guizehen, helped Liu file petitions and found a lawyer to help. Liu eventually taught himself to write and sent hundreds of petition letters while he served his sentence.
In March 2015, attorney Zhang Yupeng of Shangquan Law Firm in Beijing provided pro bono legal assistance and represented Liu in his retrial.
Factors Contributing to the Wrongful Conviction
False Confession
When Liu was first interrogated on October 29, 1990, he insisted that he was innocent. However, the next day he confessed to having a sexual relationship with Zheng and murdering her. Over the course of fifteen subsequent interrogation statements, he denied guilt six times and confessed nine times. The statements in which Liu admitted his guilt differed from one another with respect to his motive, where he killed Zheng, and how he killed her. The inconsistencies and lack of other evidence led the procuratorate to return the case for further investigation.
Liu told his attorney and members of the media that he was tortured by the investigators in order to force him to confess. According to the lawyer, the changes in Liu’s confessions appeared to be efforts to conform to the investigators’ theory of the crime. However, some of his statements contradicted the information from the autopsy and the niece’s account of an abduction. When it vacated Liu’s conviction, the Jilin High Court held that the existing evidence was insufficient to prove that the police had engaged in torture
Investigator’s Tunnel Vision
When Zheng’s niece initially reported that Zheng was taken away by two individuals on bicycles, the police regarded it as a kidnapping. However, after Zheng’s body was recovered and the autopsy revealed that she was pregnant, investigators focused on identifying the man who impregnated her on the theory that he was the killer. Despite information that conflicted with this theory—for example, Liu did not have a bicycle at the time, so was unlikely to have been one of the abductors—investigators continued to pressure Liu into confessing and failed to pursue alternative possibilities.
Absence of Forensic Evidence
Shortly after it decided to retry Liu’s case, the Jilin High Court sent a letter to the Intermediate Court requesting a DNA analysis of the remains of Zheng and the fetus. The court wanted to finally determine if Liu was the father. The court also asked her brother, Zheng Dianchen, to submit a DNA sample, suggesting that it may have wanted to confirm the body found more than a year after Zheng’s abduction was, in fact, Zheng’s body. Zheng Dianchen opened up his sister’s grave but found the coffin had rotted away and most of the remains were missing. The analysis could not be conducted. Portions of the remains that had been taken by police during the initial investigation had already been destroyed.
Procedural Errors
Liu attempted to appeal his original conviction but was unable to do so in writing, and his oral statement of intent to appeal was ignored.
After the Jilin High Court decided to hold a retrial, it delayed holding a hearing for four years and then took two years to issue its verdict. According to Article 207 of the version of the Criminal Procedure Law in force in 2012, the retrial should have been held and a new verdict issued within three to six months.
No Defense Lawyer
Liu did not hire a defense attorney during his first-instance trial and none was provided for him.
Other Developments
On January 7, 2019, the Intermediate Court awarded Liu 4.6 million RMB ($666,080) in state compensation. A photo of the state compensation decision can be found here.
Information Sources
By Tammy Tam, 2026 USALI summer intern.