China Man, Jailed For 25 Years On Wrong Conviction, Gets $670,000 Reward

A Chinese court today awarded 4.6 million yuan ($670,000) in damages to a man who was acquitted after spending 25 years in prison due to a judicial error, the state media reported.

"The Intermediate People's Court in the city of Liaoyuan in China's northeastern Jilin province announced the compensation after Liu Zhonglin was absolved of murder charges in April 2018. He spent 9,217 days in "wrongful incarceration", Xinhua news agency reported.

Liu was arrested in connection to the 1990 murder of a woman found dead in a field in Dongliao county. He was given a suspended death sentence for murder by the court in 1994. The provincial higher people's court upheld the ruling a year later.

Liu and his family repeatedly appealed the sentence, which was finally commuted to a 25-year prison term.

He was released in 2016. But his verdict was revoked in April 2018 as the higher court ruled that the previous convictions were based on "unclear facts and insufficient evidence".

The Supreme People's Court, the highest judicial authority in the country, said that courts throughout China had heard over 28,000 state compensation cases from 2013 to October 2018, as the country strives to protect the legitimate rights of those who have been wronged, the report said.