Man who spent 11 years on death row gets $277,000 compensation
A man who was wrongly accused of murder and spent 11 years on death row was awarded 1.27 million yuan (S$277,000) compensation by a Chinese court on Monday (Dec 28), Xinhua news agency reported.
Mr Zeng Aiyun was condemned to death three times for killing a fellow graduate student.
Each time, the verdict was set aside by China's Supreme People’s Court and a new trial was ordered.
At his fourth trial at Xiangtan Intermediate People’s Court in July this year, Mr Zeng was finally exonerated.
Mr Zeng was a graduate student at Xiangtan University in Hunan province in 2003 when he was accused of murdering a fellow student.
He was first convicted in 2004, and again in 2005 and 2010 during two retrials.
At his third retrial in mid 2015, the court found another student, Chen Huazhang, to be the sole killer.
Chen, who had previously been sentenced to life imprisonment as Zeng’s accomplice, poisoned the victim out of jealousy, Xinhua said, and laid a false trail to implicate Mr Zeng.
Mr Zeng said he was not satisfied with the compensation and would go back to court to seek more, the Beijing Times reported on Tuesday (Dec 29).
Source: AFP
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