BEIJING, Dec 23: A top court in China has appointed a five-judge bench to review a rape-and-murder case 19 years after the convict was executed, as another man insists he is guilty raising questions over judicial impartiality.
The Higher People’s Court of east China’s Shandong Province appointed the judges.
The court is reviewing the case of Nie Shubin, who was executed in 1995 at the age of 21 for the 1994 rape and murder of a woman in Hebei’s provincial capital Shijiazhuang, state-run Xinhua news agency reported today.
The court’s decision came after 47-year-old Wang Shujin, who was apprehended by police in 2005 for three unconnected rape and murder cases, confessed to have raped and killed the same woman in Nie’s case. Wang claims Nie was innocent.
Hebei Higher People’s Court, which approved the death penalty for Nie in 1995, did not believe his claim in a retrial last year and Nie’s verdict still stands.
Wang’s claims have raised public questions of judicial impartiality.
Several police and judicial officials faced investigations about the wrongful conviction.
In a similar case, a teenager named Huugjilt from Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, was found guilty of the rape and murder of a woman in a public toilet in the regional capital Hohhot on April 9, 1996 and sentenced to death in May 1996.
He was executed in June 1996.
An alleged serial rapist and killer, Zhao Zhihong, confessed to the murder when he was arrested in 2005.
Huugjilt was acquitted on December 15. (PTI)
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