Two men in Central China who were wrongly jailed for robbing a post office have been declared innocent after a 13-year effort to clear their names, the Xinhua news agency said on Sunday. Postal worker Zou Shujun and his friend, Yuan Haiqiang, were convicted of robbing a village post office in Henan Province of 8,200 yuan ($1,200).
The real robbers were discovered after Zou and Yuan had each served jail terms of more than five years, Xinhua said, but local courts refused to reverse the guilty ruling on the pair. In repeated petitions to the courts and media, Zou and Yuan said they were beaten up and forced into confessing to a crime they never committed.
Lawyers are slowly gaining greater rights for defendants in Chinese courts, but forced confessions are still a widespread problem and those seeking redress for injustice have few places to turn.
China instituted a review of death penalty cases more than a year ago, after a well-publicised incident in which a man jailed for murdering his wife was released after she turned up alive and unharmed many years later. In the Henan postal workers' case, pressure from the provincial legislature led to the retrial, Xinhua said. Three intermediate court officials and one county court official were punished for their handling of the case. As for Zou and Yuan, they are to get 360,000 yuan in compensation for their ordeal, Xinhua said.