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Cover news reporter Dai Rui
At 9:00 a.m. on January 13, the Shandong Provincial Higher People's Court pronounced a verdict in the Zibo Intermediate People's Court on the retrial of the "Linshu No. 2 Middle School Rape and Murder Case" that occurred 15 years ago: The defendants in the original trial, Zhang Zhichao and Wang Guangchao, are not guilty, and this judgment is final.
The "Rape and Murder Case in Linshu No. 2 Middle School in Shandong Province" has aroused widespread concern in public opinion. In January 2005, a senior high school girl at Linshu No. 2 Middle School in Shandong Province disappeared, and a month later, her body was found in an abandoned toilet at the school, and forensic medical identification showed that the body was naked. The next day, Zhang Zhichao, a 15-year-old high school student, was taken from his home by police.
Zhang Zhichao (right), Wang Guangchao (center), and Zhang Zhichao's mother, Ma Yuping (left), are outside the courthouse after the acquittal is pronounced on January 13. Cover news reporter Chai Maple Orange photography
In March 2006, the Linyi Intermediate People's Court found Zhang Zhichao guilty of rape in the first instance and sentenced him to life imprisonment. Wang Guangchao, who was in the same grade, was charged with harboring and sentenced to three years' probation and three years' probation. After the first-instance judgment was pronounced, Zhang Zhichao did not appeal, but after 5 years in prison, he filed a complaint denying that he was responsible. In December 2017, the Supreme Court ordered the Shandong Higher People's Court to retry the case, and on December 5, 2019, the Shandong Higher People's Court tried the rape and harboring case of Zhang Zhichao and Wang Guangchao in private.
Chen Guangzhong, a criminal procedure jurist in China and former president of China University of Political Science and Law. Infographic
After the acquittal verdict, Chen Guangzhong, a criminal procedure jurist in China and former president of the China University of Political Science and Law, said in an interview with a cover news reporter that the rehabilitation of this case shows that there were indeed a small number of wrongfully unjust cases in the past. It is hoped that the judicial organs will, in line with the principle of seeking truth from facts, let more unjust cases be rehabilitated as soon as possible. At the same time, he pointed out that the rehabilitation of this case shows that the judicial organs have made a new progress in implementing the decisions of the Third and Fourth Plenary Sessions of the Eighteenth Central Committee and in ensuring judicial fairness.
Chen Guangzhong is a pioneer and an important founder of criminal procedure law in New China, and has been called by the media as "the key to 'doubting guilt from nothing' to enter the law". In recent years, Chen Guangzhong has repeatedly spoken out in public about some widely publicized cases. He once said that individual cases are not just individual cases, and individual cases will reflect a certain degree of social universal effect, so as to develop from the justice of individual cases to the general justice.
"When our judicial organs handle a case, especially such a major and complex case, they must adhere to the statutory standard of proof, that is, the facts must be clear and the evidence is indeed sufficient." Chen Guangzhong explained to the cover reporter that specifically, to draw a conclusion to be unique, it must be him, and there can be no other possibilities. Zhang Zhichao's case is far from reaching this point, and there are many contradictions in the evidence in the case. In this case, the arrest and sentencing of the family at that time clearly violated the rule of exclusion of illegal evidence, because some of the evidence was collected illegally.
The cover news reporter learned that Chen Guangzhong had played a role in promoting the rehabilitation of Zhang Zhichao's case. On April 27, 2016, Chen Guangzhong also expressed his opinion on the zhang zhichao case at a seminar on the case.
He recalled to the cover reporter that in 2016, Li Meng, a reporter for Democracy and the Rule of Law magazine, approached him and asked him to pay attention to Zhang Zhichao's case. "I learned about this case at the symposium, and I thought that this case had many doubts, it was a case with insufficient evidence and contradictions in evidence, and it should be filed and retried.
The reporter noted that Chen Guangzhong pointed out several doubts in Zhang Zhichao's case at the symposium: The evidence in the case was mainly a confession, the confessions of the parties changed repeatedly, Zhang Zhichao did not have the time to commit the crime, the woven bag at the scene could not explain the source, the rape case was determined but there was no biological trace, and the "second rape of the corpse" was obviously contrary to life experience.
Chen Guangzhong told reporters that through this case, it also shows that there are indeed a small number of wrongful and unjust cases in the cases handled by the judicial organs in the past, and some cases are still appealing, and there are still unjust, false and wrongly decided cases in the appeal cases. "I hope that our judicial organs will adhere to the principles of being responsible to the people, to judicial fairness, to the parties, and to seek truth from facts, and dare to redress unjust cases and let more unjust cases be rehabilitated as soon as possible."
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