A woman in eastern China is seeking 6.75 million yuan ($955,000) in government compensation after being wrongly imprisoned for eight years on suspicion of poisoning her neighbours.

Ren Yanhong, who was exonerated in September, filed a compensation claim with the Linyi Intermediate People’s Court in Shandong province on Tuesday, according to Sixth Tone’s sister publication The Paper. The same court had convicted her of killing four people in 2013.

The 49-year-old is also demanding a public apology for her wrongful imprisonment.

The compensation application, seen by Sixth Tone, details how Ren lived during her detention: eating, sleeping, and using the toilet under a surveillance camera in a single room with the lights on 24 hours a day. Years of being confined to the “damp and dark cell” had left Ren suffering from calcium, potassium, and zinc deficiencies, as well as general malnutrition, the document said.

Ren’s lawyer, Qu Zhenhong, told Sixth Tone that Ren was locked up longer than anyone else in the detention center, and that eight years behind bars had taken a severe physical and mental toll on her.

“This case has done tremendous psychological damage to Ren Yanhong and her family,” Qu said. “No matter how much compensation is awarded, it can’t possibly make amends, and it’ll never bring those eight years back.”

Ren was detained in 2011 on suspicion of using poison to murder a family of four in her home village of Dongling, which is administered by Linyi City. She was handed a suspended death sentence in 2013.

Sixth Tone previously reported that Ren had confessed to the killings under duress, and had continuously pleaded her innocence since the initial conviction. After two retrials ended with the same verdict, the Shandong High People’s Court in December 2018 ordered a third retrial due to a lack of evidence. Six months later, Linyi’s public prosecutor withdrew the case.

Ren was released from the detention center on Aug. 1, 2019.

According to the compensation claim, Ren’s family, too, suffered because of the misinformation being spread about Ren — her “improper relations” with one of the people she allegedly poisoned, for example. During the years Ren was detained, her mother-in-law killed herself.

China’s State Compensation Law stipulates that the government must pay compensation for each day of wrongful imprisonment based on the previous year’s national average salary, which is currently pegged at 346.75 yuan a day.

According to her claim, Ren is seeking 6.75 million yuan from the government: 3.05 million yuan for the infringement of her personal freedom, 3 million yuan for emotional distress, and 200,000 yuan for medical expenses, among other matters.

Ren’s case is one of a growing number of court verdicts overturned in recent years by the Chinese judicial system. From 2014 to 2018, the country’s courts reviewed 83,315 compensation claims, 22,954 of which involved alleged miscarriages of justice. Over another span of time, 2013 to 2016, domestic courts overturned 3,718 convictions.

China’s court system is well-known for an overall conviction rate of nearly 100%. But as the country’s public security and judicial bodies become more robust, they’re discovering that many prior convictions were based on trumped-up charges or forced confessions.

In an effort to prevent wrongful convictions, the Supreme People’s Court declared in 2014 that courts should adhere to the “presumption of innocence” and not convict suspects in cases where there’s insufficient evidence.

In a similar case, Wu Chunhong, a carpenter who was wrongfully imprisoned for 16 years in the central Henan province before being acquitted in April, filed a claim for 18.7 million yuan in state compensation. As of 2018, the largest such sum ever awarded — 2.75 million yuan — was to a man who spent 23 years in prison.

According to Qu, the lawyer, Ren is particularly pained to have missed seeing her children grow up: Her son and daughter were 16 and 6 when she was first detained in 2011. Now, coming up on a year since Ren was set free, she is still struggling to resume a normal life, Qu said.

“She can be a little slow to respond, such as when she uses cellphones or things like that. When we went to the court, she didn’t understand how to show her health code,” the lawyer said, referring to a QR code system implemented during the pandemic. “She’s now recovering and trying to adapt.”

Editor: Kenrick Davis.

(Header image: People Visual)