Abstract
Nothing exposes the flaws of a criminal justice system more compellingly than wrongful convictions. He Jiahong’s book details how wrongful convictions have occurred in China and what has caused them. Readers would find the book extremely informative. After reading the book, one would have learnt not only about the most infamous wrongful conviction cases that have taken place in China during the period spanning 1995 to 2008 in a blow-by-blow account, but also about the laws, protocols and practices regarding the administration of criminal justice in China.
Putting his part-time hobby of writing fictional crime thrillers to good use, He strives to spare readers the tedium usually associated with an academic thesis and writes with flair. The book is, however, not fictional. The author adopts a narrative journalistic style which fits well with the visceral nature of the tragedies that have befallen the victims of wrongful convictions, for example She Xianglin and Zhao Zuohai – both were eventually exonerated only because the wrongfully identified victims of the murders for which they were convicted and given long sentences were, by chance, found to be alive.
With a clear reference to the Anglo-US criminal justice system, the author has identified 10 factors contributing to wrongful convictions in China. Some of them are shared universally by all legal systems, such as unreliable eyewitness identification, coerced confession of the suspect and flawed forensic science. Some factors are more local, for instance, the imbalance of power between the state and the defence, the acute pressure on the police to clear cases within short time-frames and the peculiar power structure in which courts are placed due to the one-party system.
In explaining the causes of wrongful convictions in China, He provides readers with a rare window on the unflattering reality of the administration of criminal justice in China, which is plagued by the inadequate and underdeveloped state of forensic science in the country, the negligence, dishonesty and abuse of power by state investigators, the incompetence of judges in handling forensic evidence, and the structural flaws of the legal system as a whole – all of which pave the paths to injustice. In the book, the author provides concrete examples that he and his research team uncovered during their extensive fieldwork. In China, empirical investigation in sensitive areas such as criminal justice has proven nearly inaccessible to foreign researchers, which only accentuates the value of this book to non-Chinese readers.
Some additional information, albeit mentioned only in passing, is fresh and interesting. One example relates to China’s past opposition to the use of lie detection technology, citing ‘ideological reasons’ for its resistance (p. 37). Another concerns a mock jury trial of the well-known case of Li Zhuang, which reversed the verdict of the real trial (pp. 176–82).
The book is not without flaws. Its most critical weakness is the absence of a clear analytical structure. The 10 identified factors contributing to wrongful convictions are presented randomly with no logical progression. In fact, it seems not to have even occurred to the author that it might be necessary to explain the criteria used for the classification of these factors. Not surprisingly, one can easily spot overlapping elements shared by different factors. The supporting evidence for each factor is also disorganized and sometimes misplaced. Without a clear analytical structure, the author not only confuses readers but also misses the opportunity to deepen the analysis by exploring the causal relations between the identified factors, for example, which of them represent the root cause, which are derivative and how these factors interact.
In addition, despite the author’s enviable collection of 137 individual cases of wrongful convictions (p. 10), most of them are, rather disappointingly, barely mentioned, let alone discussed. The author places a heavy reliance on a few cases and leaves the potential of a rather sizable database unexplored. Lastly, the book would benefit greatly from illustrations of statistical analysis of the collected data rather than the current approach of embedding such analysis in laboured narrative descriptions.