Mother's Fight to Exonerate Executed Son Highlights Gaping Holes in Justice System

(Shijiazhuang) – More than two decades after a young man in the northern province of Hebei was executed for the alleged rape and murder of a woman, his mother is anxiously awaiting a retrial to clear his name.

Zhang Huanzhi's only son, Nie Shubin, was executed in 1995 – when he was 20 – for raping and killing a woman in a cornfield near Shijiazhuang, the provincial capital. A decade later, another man arrested for a separate crime, confessed to the murder.