Monday 16 March 2009

Deadly detention

Mainland prisoners regularly die in custody and it will continue until police stop running the jails

1 comment:

Guanyu said...

Deadly detention

Mainland prisoners regularly die in custody and it will continue until police stop running the jails

Vivian Wu
16 March 2009

Mild-mannered 24-year-old Li Qiaoming was not the first, and will not be the last, to be killed in custody. But the Yunnan man was perhaps the only person to die behind bars from a game of hide-and-seek.

Jinning county police initially offered that ludicrous line as an explanation for why an apparently otherwise healthy Yuxi farmer ended up dead from head injuries, last month, two weeks after he had been detained for illegal logging.

The explanation satisfied nobody - least of all netizens, who swiftly set off an online uproar. Provincial authorities then sought to contain the public outrage by inviting a group of internet critics and journalists to question some of those involved.

In the end, three police and prison officers were sacked, and the blame for Li’s death was pinned on fellow cellmates. But the developments failed to resolve major questions about the justice system, police responsibility and why jail bullies can flourish in mainland prisons with such fatal effects.

The saga began on January 29 when Li was arrested at home by Jinning county police for illegal logging. The Yunnan Information Times quoted Li’s father, Li Defa, as saying that his shy son was cutting down the timber for money for his wedding.

Jinning detention centre police said Li was injured on February 8, as he hit a wall playing “elude the cat”, a kind of blindfolded hide-and-seek game, and was sent to hospital that day. He died four days later in the hospital.

When Mr. Li saw his son’s body, it was “covered with purple abrasions and blood; his head was swollen”. “It’s not something that could result from playing a game,” he added.

Word of the suspicious death soon spread online and “hide-and-seek” became a popular catchphrase to refer to corrupt police covering up the truth.

To a broadly sceptical public, the police explanation held no water, and netizens and the mainstream media began calling for an independent investigation.

To quell the public’s anger, Yunnan propaganda officials stepped in and invited a so-called independent panel of 15 netizens and journalists to visit the detention centre. The trip yielded no evidence to challenge the police conclusion, and critics denounced it as an official attempt to shape public opinion.

In the meantime, procurators in Kunming were conducting their own investigation and, on February 27, announced that Li had been killed by “jail bullies”, violent prisoners appointed by wardens to control other inmates.

The Kunming Procuratorate deputy chief Liu Xiaokai said that, as a newcomer, Li was beaten up repeatedly by three cellmates and sustained injuries to his head and chest. He said that on February 8, the trio blindfolded Li on the pretence of playing the hide-and-seek game and one hit him on the head. Li’s head hit the wall and he passed out. The three inmates then conspired to deceive authorities.

Prosecutors said Jinning detention officials would be punished for lax management and jail bullies would be targeted in a crackdown. Many people hailed the result as a victory for the public and the fourth estate, but some legal analysts said the key issues were not just lax management or jail bullies, but a deep-rooted, systemic problem in the detention apparatus. They said the system needed urgent reform.

The fact that Li’s death is not an isolated incident suggests a wider problem in the detention system. Some media outlets reported that a Jinning county farmer, Li Ronglin, had died in the same cell more than two years earlier, in similarly suspicious circumstances.

Over the years, an alarming number of unusual deaths in custody has revealed the grave conditions of detention centres on the mainland. In December, a 17-year-old youth died in a detention house in Luoyang, Henan province. The body was badly bruised, according to the Dahe Daily. But police said he died of a heart attack.

On April 2, 2007, Li Chaoyang, a former judge in Pingle county, Guangxi, died at the Xingan county detention centre after being detained the previous month on suspicion of taking bribes. His body was covered with wounds, according to the Legal Daily. But police said he died of “youth sudden death syndrome” caused by too much mental pressure.

A year earlier, obstetrician Wang Aimin died in the Huludao Detention Centre, after being detained with her husband for alleged medical negligence. A Beijing News report suggested that she had been tortured, but police concluded that she died of a heart attack.

Leading criminal law professor Chen Ruihua, from Peking University, said that, without radical reform of the detention centre system - in which police would no longer be responsible for its administration - tragedies like Li Qiaoming’s would continue to occur. He said that in all the cases, the suspects were said to have died due to natural causes. “But they all had signs of possible torture, with the police usually failing to provide surveillance tapes or other evidence essential for victims’ relatives to pursue the truth and initiate lawsuits against the police,” he said.

Professor Chen said the Communist Party had historically granted highly centralised power to the public security forces, making them part of the state machine to back up the party’s control of the nation. In return, police carry out their law enforcement responsibilities without checks and balances.

Detention houses are supposed to be neutral ground where defendants are held pending the outcome of prosecutions. They should be safe places where inmates are protected from harm. But Professor Chen said that, in reality, detention houses are the absolute preserve of the Ministry of Public Security, which is empowered to arrest, detain, interrogate and investigate.

“Gradually, detention centres have become a place controlled by the police as part of their turf, and the most profitable piece of their territory,” Professor Chen said.

Data showed that 15 per cent of cases were solved by evidence extracted in detention houses, he said. And, in some provinces, public security administrations were praised for improving their “case-solving rate through relentless interrogation and investigation in detention houses”.

“Police officers have full freedom to decide the timing, frequency, measures and locations for interrogation of suspects, without any third-party supervision,” Professor Chen said. “As you can imagine, this opens up a lot of scope for forced interrogation, torture and violence by guards.

“And basically, every suspect will face pressures in interrogation to confess and implicate others in wrongdoings in the hope of shortening their jail term.” If that were not enough, there is the additional threat of jail bullies. In some centres, the most violent prisoners are appointed “group leaders” or “meeting convenors” to help control other inmates. These designated leaders, often feared and revered by fellow prisoners, form gangs to bully weaker inmates or extort “presents” from them. All the while, wardens turn a blind eye.

“In Chinese jails and detention houses, it’s common for inmates to be governed and supervised by jail bullies who are, in reality, tolerated and even appointed by the detention centre guards,” Professor Chen said.

In recent years as more media attention focused on forced confessions, detention centre police have chosen not to torture suspects personally, he said. Instead, the physical and mental intimidation has been delegated to jail bullies in an attempt to regulate and intimidate newcomers, extort suspects’ families - and even just “for fun”.

According to Professor Chen, the best way to solve the problem is to separate the detention centres from the public security system, an idea many legal experts agree with.

Hainan University law school professor Wang Lin said that in the mainland’s criminal justice system, detention centres had become corrupted. “The two persistent ailments of China’s criminal system are excessively long detentions and forceful interrogations. Without a separation of investigation rights from detention rights, the lack of transparency in detention houses is inevitable,” he said.

At least now the issue is being discussed in the highest reaches of the country’s political system. Li Qiaoming’s death made the issue a hot topic at this year’s National People’s Congress and Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference meetings.

Professor Hou Xinyi, from Nankai University law school, told the CPPCC meeting that the hide-and-seek incident showed that “to prevent the recurrence of these cases, investigation and detention have to be separated”.

Liang Huixing, a senior researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and an NPC delegate, told the Southern Metropolis News that the solution to violent interrogation and abuse in detention houses was to put the centres under Ministry of Justice control. “If we could separate the investigation role from the detention role, at least we could set up a check and balance mechanism to avoid the frequent events exposed by the hide-and-seek incident,” he said.