Why did Zhang Zhichao not appeal after the first trial in his rape case? Zhang's mother: did not receive the verdict.
According to reports, the Supreme People's Court recently ordered a retrial of the case of Zhang Zhichao, a 15-year-old senior high school student in Linshu County, Shandong Province, who was detained by local police in February 2005 on suspicion of raping and murdering a girl from the same school. A year later, the Linyi Intermediate Court in Shandong Province issued a first-instance verdict, finding Zhang Zhichao guilty of rape and sentencing him to life imprisonment and deprivation of political rights for life. After the verdict of the first trial, Zhang Zhichao did not appeal.
After five years in prison, Zhang Zhichao denied that he was responsible for the case and said he was tortured by police during the interrogation stage. The reporter checked the ruling on the China Referee Instruments Network showed that on November 16, 2017, the Supreme Court made a decision on retrial, finding that the facts of Zhang Zhichao's rape that led to the death of a person, and the other defendant Wang Mouchao's harboring of him were unclear, and that there were contradictions between the main evidence, and directing the Shandong Provincial Higher People's Court to retry the case.
Zhang Zhichao old photo
Zhang Zhichao is 28 years old. He has spent nearly half his life in prison and is still serving his sentence.In 2005, the class president of senior class 24 at Linshu No. 2 Middle School in Shandong province was involved in a rape and murder case after he was identified as being near the scene of the crime. The court found him guilty of rape and sentenced him to life imprisonment, which he did not appeal. Another classmate was also sentenced to three years in prison, suspended for three years, for harboring a child. After five years in prison, Zhang Zhichao filed a complaint, saying he didn't do it.
Lawyer: there is a lot of contradictory evidence in the case
Wang Dengxue is one of the lawyers who provided Zhang Zhichao with complaint services. He said there are too many doubts in the case. First, investigative experiments show that Zhang Zhichao was unable to complete a series of criminal acts in the time identified in the verdict: "For example, according to the Linyi Intermediate People's Court's verdict of that year, Zhang Zhichao needed to complete the rape, murder, hiding of the body, and explaining that his accomplice did not report the crime in about three and a half minutes, and at the same time, he also had to run downstairs, through the students who were running drills, to go to the kiosk to buy a lock Come back and lock the door. This we have done experiments, just running down to buy a lock, even if you do not pass through the students (on the morning exercise), there is no one above (in the case of), this time can not be completed."
And the verdict found that Zhang Zhichao committed rape at the location, is in a building at any time there are people activities, Wang Dianxue think, this is contrary to common sense: "downstairs that kiosk owner also testified. He opened this kiosk at 7:00 a.m., and the verdict was written that he went to buy a lock at 6:20 a.m. So this owner has testified that he was never open at 6:20 a.m., and the owner of the store could not have gone to sell a lock."
In the view of Wang Dianxue, there is a very significant doubt is that the witness testimony that the deceased was killed before the clothes worn, and the clothes worn at the scene of the crime, completely different: "According to the deceased that morning into the school, with her into the campus, and the first night to live together with a girl (in the case of the crime), the same day to the public security to do a The statement mentioned that the deceased was wearing a yellow cotton jacket and white pants, while at the scene of death, she (the deceased) was wearing a red cotton jacket and blue pants. Then it is very obvious that the deceased could not have changed her clothes after she was killed ten minutes after entering the school, then this is also a very significant doubt."
Li Xun, a lawyer who has been providing complaint services for Zhang Zhichao since 2014, said that after reviewing the case file, they found that the evidence used to determine that Zhang Zhichao committed the crime in this case is basically rhetorical evidence: "For example, some of the victim's physical characteristics, because of privacy, I can't express too much here. . These are also with the objective natural phenomenon is not consistent, is contrary to the forensic science, he could not get out of the victim is Zhang Zhichao rape and kill; including this Zhang Zhichao said that the rape and murder of this tool, with a knife to cut through the body, these knives, physical evidence and what can not be found. The autopsy report has a photo of the victim, I obviously see the victim's head has a pre-birth injury, the so-called pre-birth injury, that is, she must have been in the pre-birth of a person with a flat object hit the head of this pre-birth injury is very obvious, but this injury is how to come? There is no reflection of this in the file. But I am very surprised that none of this contradictory evidence in the course of the first trial has been brought out, none of it has been taken seriously."
Zhang Zhichao's mother: son was tortured to make a confession
But how did all this evidentiary material come about as a verdict? Why did Zhang Zhichao not appeal after the first trial verdict?
Zhang Zhichao's mother said her husband died a long time ago, and she didn't have much education and didn't know the law. She had not received a copy of the first-instance verdict of Zhang Zhichao's conviction, and did not know how to appeal: "People from the provincial court asked me, how come you only have a first trial? What about your second trial? I said, "You didn't give me the judgment of the first trial, so how can I complain? How could I appeal to him? So I said I didn't know where my son's second trial was. Then my son waited for a long time before he said, "Mom, they tortured me to make me confess, and I haven't dared to say anything. I said, "Son, why did you not say so earlier? It's been five or six years, he hasn't dared to say anything, even he was wronged himself he didn't dare to say anything, (he's just) a 15-year-old kid."
The above statement was not confirmed by the relevant departments.
Chen Guangzhong, a litigation jurist and lifelong professor at the China University of Political Science and Law, said in an interview with the Voice of China after studying the materials related to Zhang Zhichao's case, "I've read the material, and now the evidence is mainly confessions. The general view is that I think this case should be brought up for retrial. And I think that the existing materials should be "vindicated" if a few of them stand up."
Chen Weidong, a professor at Renmin University of China's law school and director of the Research Center for Litigation System and Judicial Reform, believes that the functions and roles of provincial courts in complaint cases should be defined through improved legislation. "If the judiciary does not pay attention, ignoring the parties, the complainant you run through the legs is useless, the complaint is difficult to come out. So if the complainant can't solve the problem down there, he goes up there, and that's how the abuse of the complaint arises. How to identify or define the criminal complaint, the provincial courts in the complaint in this function and role to play a good. Because many of our cases have to go through the provincial high courts. In fact, there are still a lot of cases, the provincial high court this level of complaints, he will give you delay. Judicial reform has also put the correction of wrongful convictions, in the improvement of human rights judicial protection of this part, as an important element of the reform."