Reduce wrong cases

Innocent people being prosecuted and sentenced is the last thing a society with a mature rule of law should tolerate, but no judicial system can be free of wrong cases. What matters is a mechanism to reduce the rate of wrong cases to the minimum. So it is laudable for China's judicial experts to admit that judicial workers are fallible and that the mechanism must be improved to reduce the number of wrong cases to the minimum.

A research report by criminology experts with Renmin University of China reveals that at least 164 innocent people were tried and sentenced to different years of imprisonment in the past three decades. Their research finds that most of them were prosecuted on charges such as murder, rape, robbery and drug smuggling. This coincides with an investigation of wrong cases by the Supreme People's Procuratorate in 2004.

In a forum attended by more than 100 prosecutors nationwide last week, they pointed out that most of the wrong cases were revealed by coincidences and then amends made. This underscores the lack of an effective mechanism to re-examine the tried cases.