Chart of the Day: Compensation for Wrongful Convictions

Liu Zhonglin was jailed for 25 years after being wrongly convicted of murdering a woman in a village in Northeast China’s Jilin province. Now he has been given 4.6 million yuan ($673,000) in state compensation, a local court announced on Jan. 7.

Liu’s case is the latest miscarriage of justice in which a wrongly convicted person was compensated. The quarter-century he spent behind bars is thought to be the longest such imprisonment, a fact reflected in the large compensation he received.

In recent years, China’s courts have been correcting wrongful convictions, which have often come from inaccurate evidence, or confessions obtained through forceful or violent police interrogations. According to a report from the Supreme People’s Court in March 2018, the courts had retried and changed more than 6,700 wrong convictions since 2013.

Caixin has compiled a list of 15 high-profile wrongful convictions that have been overturned in recent years. While some defendants received compensation, others will never see justice for themselves as they have already been executed. In such cases, compensation is typically paid to their families.