Chinese man compensated for 8 years wrongful custody

Photo taken one day after Nian Bin was acquitted and released on Aug 22 after being wrongly convicted four times.[Photo/CFP]

Nian suffered from Grade Eight disability due to wearing handcuffs and shackles, according to earlier media reports. China has a ten-grade occupational injury assessment system with grade one the most serious.

On the evening of July 27, 2006, four people in Fuzhou's Pingtan county, three of them children, fell ill while having supper. Two of the children died. Police believed their neighbor Nian Bin, then 30, was responsible because he was not on good terms with the victims' family.

The first verdict came in February 2008, when the Fuzhou Intermediate People's Court sentenced Nian to death. The provincial Higher People's Court upheld the verdict in June 2009 after Nian's appeal.

The Supreme People's Court did not approve the death sentence and revoked the second trial verdict in April 2010. Fuzhou Intermediate People's Court gave Nian a death sentence at a third trial in November 2011. Nian appealed again and was acquitted in August 2014.

In December, a court in north China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region ruled that the parents of a man who was wrongly convicted and executed in 1996 should receive state compensation of more than two million yuan.