Nearly 20 years after Zhou Yuan, who would be 47 today, received the death penalty for murder and rape, Zhou finally received his long-expected court judgment to clear his name.

The high court of Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region on Thursday ruled against previous trials and announced that Zhou is innocent. The earlier judgments were found to be based on a lack of evidence and facts, as they were mainly based on Zhou’s unproven confessions, the court ruled.

Zhou was first arrested in 1997 after a string of sexual assaults and attacks on females in Yining City, Xinjiang, since 1991. Zhou later confessed during interrogation that he had committed 38 cases even though there was no evidence to prove that Zhou was the offender. During his first trail in 1998, he was sentenced to death with parole for two years.

Meanwhile, another arrested suspect, Huo Yong, confessed that he had committed 34 thefts and sexual assault cases, with detailed descriptions that matched many cases in Zhou’s case. Huo was then executed after the court ruled that he had committed six sexual assault cases against women.

Afterward, Zhou asked for a second trial at the intermediate court of Yining, which converted his death penalty in 1999 into life imprisonment. The term was shortened to 15 years in 2011 with the decrease in the number of cases pinned on Zhou.

In 2013, the Supreme People’s Court of China instructed the Xinjiang high court to review the case after numerous appeals by Zhou and his mother. In 2016, the Supreme Court announced that the case should be retried, because even the 15-year sentence was based on insufficient evidence.

(Zhou Yuan  Photo/Thecover.cn)

Many people began to follow Zhou’s case in 2016 and a fair judgment has been widely expected. Some net users called it a repeat of Nie Shubin’s case, a Chinese man who was exonerated 21 years after his execution for rape and murder.