China Focus: Life after exoneration

At 31, Qian Renfeng is unmarried, homeless and jobless. After spending more than a decade in prison for a crime she did not commit, she must now adjust to life in a world that seems almost alien.

When her life sentence for murder was quashed last week, Qian did not even know how to use a cell phone: When she was incarcerated in March 2002, such devices had barely made it to her impoverished village in Qiaojia County in southwest China's Yunnan Province.

Her village is almost unrecognizable. However, while new, flat, tarmac roads connect neat buildings, which boast all the trappings of modern society, her childhood home is the same old, rundown shack she left 13 years ago.

In February 2002, at a nursery where Qian was working as a nurse, a toddler died of food poisoning and two other children were hospitalized.

Qian, who had prepared the children's meals that day, was forced into confessing that she had mixed raticide in with the food. It was on the basis of this forced confession that she was to be found guilty of murder.

"The interrogators made me kneel for hours, cuffed my hands behind my back," she said. "In a state of fury, extreme pain and exhaustion, I said I was guilty."

She said that she had littered her confession with contradictions in the hope that the investigators would uncover these lies and declare her innocent, but they didn't. She only escaped capital punishment because she had not yet turned 18, and in China the death penalty does not apply to minors.

The world has changed so much in the years when Qian was stripped of her freedom.

Her mother died eight months before she was released from jail.

"I was told that even on her deathbed, Mom was inconsolable over my absence and my wrongful conviction," she told Xinhua on Monday.

While Qian only made it to the fifth grade, her sister, who is two years younger and illiterate, is married and has a son. Qian spent her first two nights of freedom in her sister's big family home, and she could not shake off her resentment.

"She has everything and I have nothing -- not even an ID, which means I can't buy a cellphone or open a bank account," she said bitterly.

As bleak as Qian's future may seem, she remained resolute throughout her prison term, even when her pleas of innocence fell on deaf ears.

Although she found writing extremely difficult, while behind bars, Qian wrote petition after petition asking for a retrial, but to no avail.

Then in April 2010, a group of lawyers visited the No. 2 Prison for Women in Yunnan Province, where Qian was an inmate, and offered the priosners free legal advice.

"Their visit was a glimmer of hope in the darkness, so I shared my story with Yang Zhu, one of the lawyers," she said.

Yang said he saw something in Qian's eyes that convinced him of her innocence. "I saw extreme sadness, grievance and urgency, which was rare in someone who had been in prison for eight years."

When Yang studied Qian's files, he found the contradictions in her "confession," forged signatures on documents that Qian said she had never seen, and an apparent lack of substantial evidence to support her murder conviction.

Yang helped Qian file for a retrial in August 2011. Even though the provincial higher people's court rejected the petition, Yang refused to give up.

In July 2013, the Yunnan provincial procuratorate agreed to reopen the case. The investigation took nearly two years. In May 2015, the procuratorate ruled that there was a lack of evidence to support the conviction, and advised the provincial higher court to rehear the case.

The retrial was in September and Qian was declared innocence on Dec. 21.

"She waited too long and suffered too much," said Yang. "I will help her apply for state compensation."

After all these years, Yang is still hopeful that the real murderer will be found and those who tortured Qian will be brought to task.

The provincial higher people's court on Sunday ordered an investigation into the people who handled Qian's case in 2002, vowing to punish any of those implicated in this miscarriage of justice.

Yang said he had uncovered evidence that might lead to the arrest of the real offender, but he was not ready to share the identity of the potential suspect with the press, just yet. "I'll follow the legal procedures and wait for the court's decision. But one thing is certain: Qian's exoneration is not the end of the story. I'm confident justice will be done."

In China, the statutory limitation periods for murder and manslaughter cases are 20 and 10 years.

While these time limits still stand, China is overhauling its legal system in other ways to guarantee citizens' rights.

In June, the government released a white paper on judicial justice and transparency, which gave observers cause to celebrate as courts nationwide had re-heard 1,317 cases and corrected a number of wrongful convictions in 2014.

One such case was the conviction and subsequent execution of 18-year-old Huugjilt in 1996. An Inner Mongolian court found the teenager guilty of raping and then murdering a woman in a public toilet. In December 2014, he was posthumously acquitted of the crimes, and his parents received more than 2 million yuan (327,060 U.S. dollars) in state compensation.

Qian counts herself lucky that she still has the opportunity to rebuild her life. She said she will try to move on and find her way.

"I plan to move to Kunming and find casual work as a dishwasher or an apprentice to a tailor."

She knows this next stage in life won't be easy. "I'm ready to start from the very beginning. It's like moving into an empty house: You buy a bed today, a fridge tomorrow and a cooker the day after. Step by step, you will build a life for yourself." Endi