Former nurse demands state compensation for wrongful conviction

KUNMING - Former nurse Qian Renfeng, from Southwest China's Yunnan province, is seeking state compensation after she was wrongfully convicted of murder.

Qian's lawyer filed her appeal with Yunnan Provincial Higher People's Court on Wednesday, demanding up to 9.55 million yuan ($1.45 million) in damages.

Qian was only 17 when she was stripped of her freedom. The sentence was quashed in December last year, because it lacked sufficient evidence.

In February 2002, at a nursery where Qian was working, a toddler died of food poisoning and two other children were hospitalized.

Qian, who had prepared the children's meals that day, was forced into confessing that she had mixed raticide in the food. It was on the basis of this forced confession that she was to be found guilty of murder.

"The interrogators made me kneel for hours, cuffed my hands behind my back," she said after her release from prison. "In a state of fury, extreme pain and exhaustion, I said I was guilty."

She said that she had littered her confession with contradictions in the hope that the investigators would uncover these lies and declare her innocent, but they did not. She only escaped capital punishment because she had not yet turned 18. In China, the death penalty does not apply to minors.

Qian's lawyer Yang Zhu, broke down the compensation request: 5.8 million was for the wrongful conviction, 2 million yuan for psychological harm and 1.6 million yuan to cover legal costs.

The fifth-grade graduate found writing extremely difficult. However, while behind bars, she penned many petitions.

In April 2010, her luck changed. A group of lawyers visited No. 2 Prison for Women in Yunnan province, where Qian was an inmate, and offered the prisoners free legal advice.

"Their visit was a glimmer of hope in the darkness. That was when I shared my story with the lawyer Yang Zhu," she said.