CHINA:Five young Chinese men are believed to be victims of a miscarriage of justice, writes Clifford Coonanin Beijing
Liu Feiyan collapsed when she heard her son, Lin Zhiqiang (18), a bus conductor in Guangdong, had been sentenced to death for robbing and killing local dairy farmer Yang Mingrui in 1996 for 1,500 yuan (€150) and a beeper.
"I remember how I fell down when I heard my son had been taken by the police," said Liu. "My husband's health is still not good. My son was always a good boy, never greedy. My heart still aches."
His friend Lin Ruiqiang, also 18, and working as a stonecutter, had been arrested too. He was sentenced to death as well, his father Lin Lebo recalls.
"In those days my wife cried all the time. You could have washed her face with the tears she shed every day," said Lin.
Both of their sons are still sitting on death row in Jieyang jail, although their death sentences have been commuted to life imprisonment by the Guangdong supreme court.
The families of the five teenagers convicted of the murder have come to Beijing from their village of Jieyang in Guangdong to petition the central government for their sons' release.
They believe, as does an influential group of civil-rights lawyers, that the men are innocent, were convicted on flimsy evidence and that confessions were obtained under duress by police officers under pressure to secure a speedy conviction.
The police organised a wide dragnet in February 1996, taking in 20 suspects three weeks after Yang was found beaten to death in a field.
In China, the slogan runs: "All capital cases must be solved."
Police were given a month to find the killer. Those who could afford to bribe their way out did so and those who had solid alibis were released. The police kept the group of four friends and one other man, Lin Haoping, who was not known by the four.
"He is innocent - they are all innocent," said Lin Lebo, a calm, dignified man, whose voice wavered as he retold the events of 11 years ago. "They broke a bone in my son's back they hit him so hard to get a confession, but he wouldn't sign.
"On his seventh day in custody, the police drove him to a lonely place and told him to run. They pointed a gun at him and said they would shoot him and make it look like he was trying to escape. He begged them not to kill him and he signed."
One of the friends is Lin Zhuochun, who served 11 years of a 15-year sentence and is in Beijing to support his friends' parents and to clear his own name. He pulls down the neck of his shirt and shows me where his breastbone was shattered during interrogation, beaten with pipes wrapped in cloth.
"Four of us knew each other. We had no police record. The police told all of us separately that the others had confessed. They tried to make me sign a blank piece of paper," he said.
Even the victim's wife, Lin Ruifang, told the families that she thought the police evidence contained major errors.
Lawyer Li Fangping is one of a group of civil-rights lawyers taking on the cases of people they believe were wrongly convicted and sentenced to death. He said there could be 1,000 people wrongly convicted in this way.
He and a colleague, Li Heping, are also investigating two murders in 1999 in Leping, Jiangxi, for which four farmers are on death row, and a third case in Chengde, in the northern province of Hebei, from 1994, when four men were sentenced to death for killing two taxi drivers.
"There is no real evidence in this case or in the other cases," said Li. "It was totally based on statements and they were given under torture. There are many similar cases. Serious violent cases happen, local governments come under pressure, then the police are given a time limit to find the killers, even if it's like looking for a needle in a haystack.
"They torture them and the court sentences them to death."
The death sentences are later commuted to life imprisonment because the higher courts believe the convictions are unsafe. However, retrials are rare because it involves admitting an error and a huge loss of face for the judiciary and the police.
The Chinese media has begun to expose a number of cases of false convictions for murder, most famously two years ago when Hubei villager She Xianglin was freed after serving 11 years for the murder of his wife, who returned alive to his village.
There is growing unease among the senior judiciary about the widespread use of executions. China executes more people than all other countries put together. Rights groups say about 8,000 people were executed in China in 2005, though no exact figures are released.
On January 1st, China's Supreme People's Court took back the power of final review over all death sentences, which means capital cases are tried in accordance with criminal procedure law. It also means the power of final review has been taken away from provincial courts, which often use execution as a way of combating serious crime.
Since then, legal activists believe the number of executions has fallen, to about 7,000 last year, according to San Francisco's Dui Hua Foundation.
There is increasing hope that the slogan, "kill rarely and kill carefully", will lead to a halving of executions over the next two to three years, Dui Hua said.
For Lin Lebo, the fight to clear his son's name is all-consuming. He pulls on a T-shirt proclaiming his son's innocence. "I am 60 years of age. My wife is sick since all this happened. We've spent all our money trying to clear his name . . . He's a great son, a good man, a generous man."