Killer's death sentence upheld following bungled case

HANGZHOU - A court in east China's Zhejiang province on Thursday upheld the death penalty with a two-year reprieve for a man who was convicted of killing a taxi driver in 1995, as they found that the case may have been incorrectly ruled.

The Zhejiang Provincial Higher People's Court rejected an appeal by Xiang Shengyuan, 41, who was sentenced to death with two years' reprieve for committing homicide by the Intermediate People's Court of Jiaxing City on May 30.

On March 20, 1995, Xiang, a resident of the Xiaoshan District in the provincial capital of Hangzhou, took a taxi home and had a quarrel with driver Xu Caihua on the way. Xiang later hit Xu in the face with a rock, strangled her and suffocated her to death before driving the taxi away.

He later deserted the car and took Xu's pager, earrings and cash, the court statement said.

Five other men were caught and convicted of robbing Xu and contributing to her death. Four of them were sentenced to death with a two-year reprieve and the other was sentenced to life imprisonment by the higher court in Zhejiang on July 11, 1997.

Xiang, who was previously jailed for theft in 1991, wasn't discovered until July 2011, when police who were conducting an anti-theft campaign noticed that his fingerprints matched those found at the scene of Xu's death and restarted the investigation. He was detained on December 23, 2012 and arrested on January 5, 2013.

In May, the higher court in Zhejiang granted a retrial for the five who may have been wrongly convicted. Their retrial opened on Tuesday.