A MAN who had his name cleared after spending 23 years behind bars applied for 21.3 million yuan (US$3.09 million) in State compensation in Jilin Province on Monday.

Jin Zhehong, 50, who had been sentenced to a suspended death sentence for intentional homicide, was found not guilty by the Jilin High People’s Court in November 2018, after a retrial found the evidence was insufficient to prove the conviction.

The compensation application includes 8.01 million yuan for the wrongful ruling, 9.66 million yuan for mental anguish and 1 million yuan for medical treatment and other fees, according to his lawyer Qu Zhenhong.

The application also asks the court to apologize via several national-level media outlets to remove the negative effects brought by the miscarriage of justice, Qu said.

The case dates back to Sept. 29, 1995, when a woman’s body was found near a railway track in the province’s Shuanghe Township, Yongji County. Some days later, Jin, then 27, was named as the suspect and detained.

In 1996, Jin was given the death penalty with a two-year reprieve for intentional homicide by Jilin Intermediate People’s Court.

He appealed, and the provincial high court sent the case back to the lower court for retrial a year later. But the intermediate court upheld the judgment.

The higher court returned the case to the lower court in 1998 after he appealed again. But the ruling remained the same.

Two years later, the high court approved the ruling, even though Jin continuously appealed during those years.

The case turned in 2014, when the high court considered a retrial due to the repeated appeals and media reports on a possible forced confession.

On Oct. 24, 2018, the court said in the rehearing that it was uncertain whether Jin had the time, tools and motives to do the killing. “So the chain of evidence in the case was not complete enough to prove the conviction.”

(China Daily)