The direct contributing factors and underlying political factors for wrongful convictions in China

What is it about?

Using a sample of 141 wrongful convictions (involving 206 defendants and 82% being homicide cases), this study identifies two sets of factors for wrongful convictions in the Chinese context since the 1980s: direct contributing factors and underlying political factors. The direct contributing factors include forced confession through torture, faulty crime scene investigation, eyewitness testimony, judicial misconduct, informant testimony, and prosecutorial misconduct. The underlying political factors include pressures to clear a case within a specified period, intervention from the Party Political and Legal Affair Committee, orders from a leader(s) to convict a suspect, pressures under an anti-crime Strike-hard campaign to clear a case, maintaining a good relationship between the three agencies of police, procuratorate, and courts, follow the joint decision made by the three-agency taskforce to convict a defendant, and pressures from the public or the victim’s family.

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Why is it important?

The wrongful convictions scholarship, as Leo (2005) argued, suffered from a number of methodological, conceptual, and theoretical gaps by long focusing on legal errors, not root causes of wrongful convictions, akin to “reinventing a familiar wheel”. To salvage the “theoretically impoverished” scholarship, he called for a need to go beyond the study of legal errors to understand how social forces, institutional logics, and erroneous human judgements and decisions converge to produce wrongful convictions. This study is an attempt to go beyond the ‘legal errors’ to identify the underlying political factors for wrongful convictions in the Chinese context.

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