On December 29, the Sichuan Provincial High Court acquitted Li Jin. The picture shows Li Jin holding the verdict. Photo courtesy of the interviewee.
After years of appeal, Li Jin, who had just turned 56, received a not guilty verdict.
On December 29, the Sichuan Provincial High People's Court pronounced a verdict on the retrial of Li Jin's robbery crime, and changed the verdict to acquit the defendant Li Jin in the original trial.
Compared with the retrial on April 25 this year, Li Jin's tightly knit brows have stretched slightly. Upon learning that his acquittal had been commuted, Li Jin said he "couldn't describe in words" how he felt. He told The Paper that he planned to return to Yuanmou's hometown first, rest for a while, and then deal with the matter of applying for state compensation with his lawyer.
Li Jin was taken into custody on September 30, 1995 for robbery, arrested on January 25, 1996, and released on July 7, 2017, with a time of 21 years, 9 months and 10 days in actual detention. Li Jin remembers that on the day he was released from prison, he was sent back to his hometown in Yuanmou, Yunnan Province, by a police car, and saw that his family's old house had been in ruins because it had been uninhabited and maintained for many years. Li Jin said that his parents did not visit him during his sentence and that he had cut off contact with them. He also has a younger brother and a younger sister, and they have no contact with each other.
After being released from prison, Li Jin appealed while doing odd jobs. On June 11, 2020, the Sichuan Provincial High Court issued a "Retrial Decision", deciding to start a retrial procedure for Li Jin's robbery and homicide case, after which "I did not expect to wait for more than 3 years".
Li Jin still insisted that he was in Yingjiang County, Yunnan Province at the time of the crime, not Yuanmou County, where the crime occurred. However, the Sichuan High People's Court held in the retrial that after investigation, the witness Fang Enguang could not confirm that Li Jin was in Yingjiang County on the day of the crime.
Regarding the case itself, Li Jin sighed a lot: "Two people were killed, and at that time, I and the Pufa Cheng brothers were arrested, sentenced, and locked up as **." By now, all three of us have been acquitted. In other words, the real culprit in the case is not us. Li Jin said that although the case about him has come to an end, "I, like them (the family of the deceased), hope to find out the real culprit." ”
The Paper previously reported that on October 13, 1994, the victims Yao XX and Bai XX stayed in the guest house of the Yuanmou Public Works Section of the Kunming Railway Branch. At 5:50 a.m. on October 14, Yao and Bai were found dead by the staff of the guest house, and the staff immediately reported the case. It was determined that Yao XX was killed by someone else's multiple blows to the head with a single-edged sharp and blunt object, and Bai XX was killed by someone else's stabbing of the heart and blood loss from large blood vessels with a sharp object.
At first, Li Jin and fellow villagers Pu Fa Cheng and Pu Fa Neng brothers were accused of conspiring to commit crimes. In February 1997, the Chengdu Railway Transport Intermediate Court sentenced Li Jin and Pu Fa Cheng to death and sentenced Pu Fa Neng to death with a reprieve. After the three appealed, the Sichuan High Court remanded the case for retrial. The Chengtie Intermediate People's Court retried and commuted Li Jin's sentence to life imprisonment, and the Platts brothers were not guilty. Li Jin appealed again, and at the same time, the procuratorate filed a counter-appeal. After the trial, the Sichuan Provincial High Court found that Li Jin had committed robbery and murder with others, and upheld the life sentenceThe Sichuan Provincial High Court found that there were many perpetrators in the case, but the "others" who committed the crime with Li Jin were not Platts Brothers.
The not-guilty verdict rendered by the Sichuan High People's Court held that the on-site investigation verified that there were more than two perpetrators, and that the specific perpetrators and methods of the crime were unclear in the key facts of the case. Considering the whole case, there are certain contradictions between Li Jin's guilty confession and the objective evidence in the case, the authenticity of Li Jin's guilty confession is doubtful, and there is no objective evidence at the scene pointing to Li Jin's crime, and the evidence that Li Jin and others committed the crime did not form a complete evidence system, and did not meet the legal standard of proof that the evidence was credible and sufficient.