She Xianglin served 11 years in prison for his wife's murder before going free when she turned up alive. Photograph: China Newsphoto/Reuters
Within a day of his detention, Xie Zhigang was dead. His interrogators had called the emergency services because he "had no appetite". He died in hospital, where doctors recorded the cause as a sudden heart attack.
His widow said his body told a more complicated story. "There were bruises all over his body, and deep scars on his wrist and ankles. Five of his ribs were broken," said Wang Li, who alleges that he died due to torture.
In a country that has seen repeated scandals over deaths in custody and forced confessions, two things about Xie's case stand out. First, the death in Benxi city, Liaoning, in December came months after China introduced new rules designed to reduce the use of torture in investigations. Second, Xie, who had been detained on suspicion of corruption, was a local police chief.
"Forced confessions are rampant," said Phelim Kine, Asia researcher at Human Rights Watch. "That a security official who fell foul of the authorities might end up being a victim of the same treatment really is not surprising. This is the template for investigating crimes."
No one knows how many such cases happen in China each year. A report from the ministry of public security said 1,800 police officers were suspended for torture in 2009. In a survey conducted three years earlier, 70% of prisoners said fellow detainees they knew had made forced confessions.
Teng Biao, a Beijing-based lawyer, said. "There is no annual official data on how many people are actually involved and I believe even if there is, the number wouldn't be true. I can say that it is involved in most cases to some extent ... Among my cases and those of my lawyer friends we always come across this."
The worst abuses have made waves in state media and among the public. Last March, police in a town in central Henan province were sacked after the death of a man arrested for theft. The Chongqing Evening News said officers told them he "died suddenly while drinking hot water". The dead man's family said his nipples had been cut off, his genitals slashed and his skull fractured.
It has been the futility of such tactics – as highlighted by the cases of She Xianglin and Zhao Zuohai – that has helped to galvanise opinion. Both men served lengthy sentences after admitting "murders", only for their alleged victims to reappear. Both said they were beaten into confessions.
Those miscarriages of justice were in part responsible for new rules introduced last year against the use of evidence obtained by torture. But although they are backed by the five main agencies involved in criminal procedures, they have yet to pass into national law.
In effect they are internal guidelines, and victims will not be able to use them to challenge abusive police in the courts. Experts say they demonstrate a welcome consensus at the top on the need for action, but implementation by those lower down will be another matter.
"In the criminal procedure law it says clearly that torture and forced confession is prohibited. But the reality is, the people who do this, prosecutors, the police... they are not punished for doing this," said Teng. "The ultimate reason [this still happens] is that there is no independent judicial system and there are no checks and balances on public power."
Other factors might be easier to resolve. Investigators are usually poorly trained, poorly paid and under pressure to achieve results. In major cases they are expected to meet a deadline, and failure can lose them a bonus or promotion.
Suspects have no right to a lawyer when they are detained until they are arrested formally. By then, most confessions have been made. An experiment by researchers in Beijing found that guaranteeing access to lawyers from the start almost totally eradicated torture.
Simply telling security officers what to do seems to have little effect. Since 2006, recording all interrogations of officials has been mandatory. Yet when Xie's family asked for the tape of his interview, prosecutors said they had not recorded it because they were not asking "in-depth" questions, reported China Youth Daily, which broke the story.
Ban Yue, Benxi's foreign affairs officer, told the newspaper that the city was taking the case very seriously and that the results of Xie's autopsy would be published by the end of the month. City prosecutors said queries should be referred to the provincial office, where the Guardian's calls rang unanswered.
Additional research by Lin Yi
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2011
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