Inmates at a new prison in Deyang, Sichuan Province, December 28, 2011 Photo: CFP

Seven years after a serial killer confessed to the crime for which their teenage son was executed, his aging parents are still trying to get the court to re-open the case.

The young man's father, Li Sanren, 64, and his mother, Shang Aiyun, 56, say their son, who was given the Mongolian name Hugejiletu and was just 18 when he was put to death, was only trying to do the right thing the night he heard the screams of a woman who was being raped and murdered.

Yet police in Hohhot, capital of Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, almost immediately accused the young man of the crime and interrogated him until he confessed under duress. The court then appears to have ignored witnesses who supported the teenager's alibi and discarded evidence that might have cast doubt on his guilt. Court transcripts of the trial have never been released.

"Every time we ask we are told the investigation is still underway, and that we have to be patient," said Shang during a phone interview with the Global Times.

"All we want is to clear our son's name," said Li, who is recovering from recent cancer surgery.

62 days from murder to execution

It took police and judicial authorities, which are not separated by different powers of authority and act in concert in criminal cases, just 62 days to investigate the case, extract a confession, convict and then execute Hugejiletu.

Cases like the one that led to Hugejiletu's hasty and seemingly wrongful conviction and execution are at least one reason why the Supreme People's Court on January 1, 2007, regained the power to review all death penalty decisions made by lower courts. The supreme court had been absent in reviewing death sentences for nearly three decades.

Just last Friday the Supreme People's Court suspended the death sentence given to 31-year-old Wu Ying, who was convicted of illegally raising funds and sentenced to death by the Jinhua Intermediate People's Court in Zhejiang in December 2009. Her conviction and sentence were upheld by the Zhejiang High People's Court on January 18.

The case has ignited huge debate over whether financial crimes merit capital punishment. Now that Wu's conviction has been suspended and a new trial has been ordered, some commentators are cheering the Supreme People's Court's role as the court of last resort.

"Wu's case shows the real value behind the Supreme People's Court's review of death penalties," noted an editorial by the Beijing Times.

The Supreme People's Court never makes public the number of death sentences it upholds, however, the few it overturned have been reported in the media.

Experts say the Supreme People's Court review of death sentences is an attempt to reign in the overuse of capital punishment by local courts, which in 1983 were given the exclusive right to convict and execute criminals.

That's when the police and judicial authorities began a severe crackdown on crimes that included the post-Cultural Revolution "struggles" against spiritual pollution and bourgeois liberalization.

"It was a period when many criminal cases were handled like a political campaign, which resulted in a series of unjust and wrongful convictions. I feel so heartbroken by it," said lawyer Zhang Qingsong with Shangquan Law Firm in Beijing.

 
Thousands wrongfully convicted

Xiao Yang, former president of the Supreme People's Court, reported in 2005 to the National People's Congress that his office had discovered that altogether 2,162 people had been wrongfully convicted of crimes they did not commit.

His report didn't provide a time frame for the hundreds of wrongful convictions nor details of the crimes they had been convicted of committing.

The court's shift toward using irrefutable evidence to convict and sentence someone to death is little consolation for Hugejiletu's parents, who say they will seek justice for their innocent son until the end of their days.

They continue to press the courts to re-open the case based on a local newspaper report. Published on December 16, 2005, it details the confession of serial killer Zhao Zhihong who said he committed the rape and murder for which Hugejiletu was executed.

The murky and unsavory details of the murder are well-known thanks to investigative reports which cast grave doubt on the veracity of the facts used by the police and the courts to secure the conviction.

On April 9, 1996, Hugejiletu was working at a cigar mill in Hohhot when he heard a woman screaming as he passed a public toilet on his way back to the factory after dinner.

Within 10 minutes he returned to the scene with his colleague Yan Feng to help the woman. They were too late. They found the half-naked body of a 25-year-old woman. Hugejiletu went straight to the police while Yan returned to the factory alone. Later that night, Hugejiletu and Yan were interrogated at the Xincheng branch of the Hohhot Public Security Bureau.

Two days later the police charged Hugejiletu with murder. He went on trial on May 23 and was sentenced to death on June 5 and executed five days later.

"Judicial authorities were highly efficient in sentencing people to death, which showed their indifference to life, and the ease with which they can trample a defendant's procedural rights," said Professor Yi Yanyou from the Law School of Tsinghua University.

While the police maintain that Hugejiletu confessed, leaked notes of the prosecutor tell a different story. "The notes show Hugejiletu tried to withdraw his confession which he made after being interrogated for many hours without being allowed to relieve himself," said Zhu Shunzhong, a senior reporter who reported the case in 2009 in the China Weekly.

In an interview with Xinhua News Agency in 2006, a local official, Hu Yifeng, who participated in one of the seven reviews of Hugejiletu's case and is now the president of the Regional High People's Court admitted that mistakes had been made. "We reached a conclusion that the evidence used to sentence Hugejiletu to death was inadequate."

Even the 2006 confession of serial killer Zhao hasn't helped overturn Hugejiletu's conviction. Zhao has admitted to murdering 10 people and has asked for the death penalty. His confession to the murder that Hugejiletu was found guilty of was apparently not included in Zhao's list of heinous crimes at his closed-door trial on November 28, 2006. Zhao still has not been executed.

Not held accountable

Meanwhile, many of the police officers and court judges who handled the case have been promoted, including Feng Zhiming, the head of a district public security bureau who was in charge of investigating the case and is now a key member of the Hohhot Public Security Bureau, reported Phoenix TV.

"As ordinary people we face too much resistance. We are powerless," said Hugejiletu's father with a sigh.

The Global Times phoned the Regional High People's Court of Inner Mongolia several times a day for a week. Only one of the calls was answered but a request for comment was ignored. No response has been received from a written request for comment sent to the Supreme People's Court.

"No one wants to take responsibility for the mistakes in the case, as the people who push the case might face severe punishment," said lawyer Zhang.

Investigative reporter Zhu says his sources tell him the regional high court believes the public security bureau is to blame for the mistakes in Hugejiletu's case but the court doesn't have the judicial independence to hold the police responsible, nor does it want to share the blame. "The case still lingers because overturning a wrongful conviction needs to be initiated by the court which has not yet happened," said Zhu.

Hugejiletu's case bears an ire resemblance to a case in Hebei Province, in which Nie Shubin was executed in 1996 for the murder of a woman in the province's capital Shijiazhuang. In 2005, suspect Wang Shujin was arrested by police for another crime, and confessed to killing the woman Nie was convicted of murdering.

Like Zhao, the confessed murderer in Hugejiletu's case, Wang was convicted of being a serial killer and has been on death row for seven years.

Procedural process not followed 

Hugejiletu's parents believe the courts ignored the testimony of a key witness - their son's friend Yan Feng who also found the dead woman.

In 2006 the couple hired two lawyers to help clear their son's name but they cannot gain access to the case files until a judicial review has been set in motion.

"These procedures are all regulated in the Criminal Procedure Law, but it's a big problem when the authorities don't abide by the law," said lawyer Zhang, who says the workings of the courts must be made more transparent.

Professor Yi with Tsinghua University is pessimistic Hugejiletu's case will be overturned. "I don't think local judicial authorities have the courage to redress their mistake," said Yi.

"The Public Security Bureau is too powerful, and both procurators and judges are helpless when they don't have judicial independence," said Yi, adding the key to preventing wrongful convictions lies in the "effective restriction of the police bureau's power."

For the parents who lost their son just as he was entering adulthood the wrangling and blame-placing is secondary. They simply want justice to be finally served.

"We will fight until we die. We believe in the law and that one day it will finally be proved that our son was the good person we knew him to be," said Shang, the distressed mother.