Chine: un ex-condamné à mort indemnisé après 11 ans en prison

AFP
Pékin - Un Chinois condamné à mort à trois reprises et qui a passé 11 ans en prison avant d'être acquitté a reçu un dédommagement de 1,27 million de yuans (178.000 euros), ont annoncé mardi les médias chinois.

Zeng Aiyun, ancien diplômé de l'Université de Xiangtan, dans la province du Hunan (centre), a été condamné à la peine capitale en 2004 pour le meurtre d'un camarade de classe.

Le verdict a depuis été annulé à trois reprises et de nouveaux procès ordonnés, mais lors des premiers, en 2005 et 2010, M. Zeng a de nouveau été condamné à mort.

La Cour populaire intermédiaire de Xiangtan l'a finalement disculpé pour manque de preuve lors d'un quatrième procès qui s'était tenu en juillet dernier.

Elle lui a accordé lundi une indemnisation de 1,27 million de yuans (178.000 euros), a annoncé l'agence de presse officielle Chine nouvelle.

Le tribunal a par ailleurs conclu qu'un autre étudiant était l'unique meurtrier. Chen Huazhang, déjà condamné à mort pour complicité, a empoisonné la victime par jalousie et a mis la justice sur une fausse piste afin d'impliquer M. Zeng, a précisé Chine nouvelle.

Zeng Aiyun a annoncé ne pas se contenter de l'indemnisation et vouloir demander davantage, a écrit mardi le journal Beijing Times.

L'affaire est emblématique des risques d'erreurs judiciaires en Chine, où les aveux forcés sont monnaie courante et les acquittements exceptionnels.

Les exécutions d'innocents ne sont par ailleurs pas rares dans le pays.

Fin 2014, un tribunal de Mongolie intérieure (nord) avait prononcé un retentissant acquittement post-mortem d'un adolescent exécuté à tort 18 ans auparavant.

Hugjiltu, un jeune homme d'ethnie mongole, avait été condamné en 1996 après avoir "avoué" le viol et le meurtre d'une ouvrière.

Son innocence avait été déclarée neuf ans après qu'un autre homme ait avoué le meurtre en 2005.

L'usage de la force pour obtenir des aveux reste très répandu dans le pays en dépit des engagements réguliers des autorités à y mettre fin et à faire respecter "l'autorité de la loi".

Mais les acquittements devant la justice, soumis au contrôle du Parti communiste chinois (PCC), sont plus qu'exceptionnels, les inculpés étant jugés coupables dans 99,94% des cas, selon des chiffres officiels.

NYT for the abolition of Death Penalty in USA - Editorial "The Innocent on Death Row"

The New York Times

The Opinion page - Editorial 

The exoneration of two North Carolina men who spent 30 years in prison — one on death row — provides a textbook example of so much that is broken in the American justice system. And it is further evidence (as though more were needed) that the death penalty is irretrievably flawed as well as immoral.

In late September 1983, an 11-year-old girl named Sabrina Buie was found murdered in a soybean field in Robeson County. She had been raped, beaten with sticks and suffocated with her own underwear.

Within days, police got confessions from two local teenagers, Henry Lee McCollum, 19 at the time, and his half brother, Leon Brown, who was 15. Both were convicted and sentenced to death.

The crime was so horrific that it has echoed for decades through North Carolina politics and beyond. In 1994, after Justice Harry Blackmun of the Supreme Court announced that he opposed capital punishment in all circumstances, Justice Antonin Scalia cited the Buie murder as a case where it was clearly warranted. “How enviable a quiet death by lethal injection compared with that!” he wrote.

On Tuesday, a state judge ordered both men freed after multiple pieces of evidence, some of which had never been turned over to defense lawyers, proved that neither Mr. McCollum nor Mr. Brown was responsible for the crime. DNA taken from a cigarette found at the crime scene matched a different man, Roscoe Artis, who is already serving life in prison for a similar murder committed just weeks after Sabrina Buie’s killing.

Virtually everything about the arrests, confessions, trial and convictions of Mr. McCollum and Mr. Brown was polluted by official error and misconduct.

No physical evidence linked either man to the crime, so their false confessions, given under duress, were the heart of the case the prosecutors mounted against them. Both men’s confessions were handwritten by police after hours of intense questioning without a lawyer or parent present. Neither was recorded, and both men have maintained their innocence ever since.

Equally disturbing, Mr. Artis was a suspect from the start. Three days before the murder trial began, police requested that a fingerprint from the crime scene be tested for a match with Mr. Artis, who had a long history of sexual assaults against women. The test was never done, and prosecutors never revealed the request to the defense.

[...]

Mr. McCollum and Mr. Brown, who are now middle-aged, have a hard road ahead. In addition to the difficulties of adapting to life after three decades behind bars, both are intellectually disabled. (Since their conviction, the Supreme Court has banned the death penalty for both juveniles and those with intellectual disabilities.)

Cases of capital prosecutions based on flimsy evidence or marred by prosecutorial misconduct, not to mention racial bias, are distressinglycommon. Yet, even as death-penalty supporters insist that only guilty people are sent to their death, it is now clear that Justice Scalia was prepared 20 years ago to allow the execution of a man who, it turns out, was innocent.

How many more remain on death row today? Can the American people be assured that none will be killed by the state? For this reason alone, the death penalty must end.

New Book:"The Wrong Carlos" Argues Texas Executed an Innocent Man

One of the strongest accounts pointing to the execution of a probably innocent man in recent times concerns the case of Carlos DeLuna, who was executed in Texas in 1989. 

In a forthcoming book, The Wrong Carlos: Anatomy of a Wrongful Execution, Professor James Liebman of Columbia Law School describes his investigation into the case, along with a team of students. 

The investigation uncovered serious problems in DeLuna's case, including faulty eyewitness testimony and the police's failure to investigate another potential suspect. DeLuna maintained his innocence and said another man, Carlos Hernandez, committed the crime. Hernandez and DeLuna looked so similar that their own families mistook photos of the men for each other. 

Moreover, Hernandez had a history of violent crimes like the one for which DeLuna was executed. The book and its accompanying website provide evidence of a grave mistake with police and witness records, trial transcripts, photographs, and more. The Wrong Carlos will be released in July 2014 but is available for pre-order now.

J. Liebman, "The Wrong Carlos: Anatomy of a Wrongful Execution," Columbia University Press, forthcoming July 2014

6,000 innocent children held in Nigerian prisons, report says - Dangerous and unsanitary conditions in prisons

Premium Times
Lack of potable water, inadequate sewage facilities, and severe overcrowding have resulted in dangerous and unsanitary conditions in Nigerian prisons.

Nigeria’s notorious jails and detention centres hold an estimated 6,000 children and minors, many of whom were born there and now serve terms with their parents despite a government’s order to effect their release, the United States country human rights report on Nigeria says.

Although Nigerian law forbids the imprisonment of children, by the end of 2012, the government has taken no clear step to implement its order to release and rehabilitate the children, the report, quoting an African Union study, says.

“A report by the African Union on the rights and welfare of the Nigerian child found an estimated 6,000 children lived in prisons and detention centers,” the report says. “Despite a government order to identify and release such children and their mothers, authorities had not done so by year’s end.”

Published by the US state department on country-by-country basis, the document catalogues a range of abuses and rights violations the Nigerian government is guilty of; and particularly delivered a stinging indictment of the government’s record on corruption, extrajudicial killings, disappearances and impunity in 2012.

“Impunity remained widespread at all levels of government. The government brought few persons to justice for abuses and corruption,” the report says.

“Police and security forces generally operated with impunity. Authorities did not investigate the majority of cases of police abuse or punish perpetrators. Authorities generally did not hold police accountable for the use of excessive or deadly force or for the deaths of persons in custody.”
For all, the most serious human rights problem for the nation during the year, the U.S. department said, were abuses committed by the militant sect, Boko Haram, which conducted killings, bombings, kidnappings, and other attacks mainly in northern states.

While the extremist group killed and maimed, the nation also witnessed serious rights violations with illegal killings by security forces, including summary executions, torture, rape, and other cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment of prisoners, detainees, and criminal suspects, the report said.

The U.S. verdict for 2012 is similar to that delivered on Nigeria in 2011. The 2011 report highlighted Boko Haram and Nigeria’s security forces involved in a brutal crackdown on the extremists as the gravest human rights abusers. It also noted the rocketing corruption level in the country.

A year later, the report says, the situation only deteriorated. While impunity flourished, and corruption escalated, the government did nothing to check abuses.
Also, for 2012, the report notes the dramatic clampdown on the media, seen in the arrest of several journalists, and censorship of news reports.
With recent escalation of government onslaught on the media, the 2013 report can only be predictably worse.

The document is compiled from news report, researches, publications by independent organizations and direct interviews with government officials as well as citizens.
On prisons, the report notes the brutal conditions of Nigerian prisons, reputed amongst the world’s harshest and most crowded.

The report said prison and detention centres’ conditions remained “harsh and life threatening” as prisoners, a majority of whom had not been tried, were subject to gross overcrowding, food shortages, inadequate medical treatment, and infrastructure deficiencies that led to wholly inadequate sanitary conditions.

In many of the holding facilities, the report states, female prisoners were held in same units with the males, and those pregnant at the time of incarceration gave birth to, and raised their babies in prison.

The extensive use of unofficial military prisons, including the Giwa military barracks in Maiduguri, Borno State, and the Special-Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS) detention centre, also known as the “abattoir,” in Abuja, was also mentioned.
As of March, Nigerian prison authorities said total inmates stood at 50,920 with slightly less than two percent of those being females, and one per cent juveniles.

But overcrowding was a problem as shown in prisons such as Owerri federal prison which held 1,784 against a capacity of 548, the report states.
Ogwuashi-Uku prison in Delta State, with a capacity of 64 prisoners, housed 541, while Port Harcourt prison, with a capacity of 804 prisoners, held 2,955. Ijebi-Ode prison in Lagos, with a capacity of 49 prisoners, held 309.

Most of the country’s 234 prisons, built 70 to 80 years back, lack basic facilities. Lack of potable water, inadequate sewage facilities, and severe overcrowding have resulted in dangerous and unsanitary conditions in the prisons.

 “The government did not make widespread improvements to prisons during the year, but individual prison administrations attempted to collect donations from religious organizations, NGOs, and the National Youth Service Corps to benefit inmates,” the report says.