Four in China cleared after two successful death sentence appeals 

Four men in eastern China accused of murder and rape have been exonerated after a 16-year legal ordeal in the latest instance of Chinese courts overturning deeply flawed verdicts.

A Jiangxi province high court announced yesterday it cleared the men accused of killing a woman in 2000, apologized and offered them an opportunity to seek compensation.

The men had been sentenced to death by a municipal court in 2003 based on dubious confessions and successfully appealed. The same lower court reheard the trial and sentenced the defendants to death again the following year, only to be overruled again by the provincial court in 2006.

The provincial court reviewed the case this year and determined that forensic evidence did not match confessions given by the defendants, who said they had been tortured.

A string of stories about wrongful convictions has surfaced in recent years in China, where the government has sought to strengthen a criminal justice system wracked by police and prosecutorial misconduct. Human rights monitors say suspects are often tortured by police to extract confessions and cases are swayed by political interference.

And in court, prosecutors almost always win: China has a 99.9 percent conviction rate, according to official statistics — one of the highest in the world. AP