Judicial progress being made

According to Zhou Qiang, president of the Supreme People’s Court, 1,076 criminal defendants were declared innocent last year, 37 more than in 2015, and 1,376 wrongful verdicts or sentences were changed on appeal. Such statistics, contained in the annual work report he submitted to the fifth plenary session of the 12th National People’s Congress, China’s top legislature, on Sunday, testify to China’s judicial progress.

In the latest move in February, the Supreme People’s Court issued a guideline requiring courts at all levels to base their rulings on solid evidence, exclude the use of any insufficient evidence and promote an effective mechanism to prevent and correct miscarriages of justice.

The reason why the public has long anticipated and welcomed the top judicial authorities’ decision that all verdicts should be based on solid evidence is that a number of high-profile wrongful convictions in recent years have proven to be related to the use of insufficient or suspect evidence.

People do not want a recurrence of the wrongful convictions such as that of Nie Shubin, who the top court posthumously declared innocent in December, more than 20 years after he was wrongly convicted of rape and murder and executed on the basis of unclear and insufficient evidence.

Even minor miscarriages of justice deal a heavy blow to the person concerned and his or her family. They also undermine judicial authority, credibility and justice.

To forestall wrongful convictions, courts should show more courage and make acquittals more common if the evidence is insufficient. There is also a need for the country to continuously push for further reform of the criminal law system.

To transform well-conceived reform ideas into concrete steps for greater justice, obsolete practices, such as linking the ratio of guilty verdicts to judicial personnel’s performances, need to be discarded. Only with judicial reforms that eradicate the motivation for judges to deliver guilty verdicts can justice be done.