In 2015, Le Thi Thu Ba, deputy head of the Steering Central Committee for Judicial Reform, reflected to the National Assembly that, because the principle of presumption of innocence was not clear, there were cases that had been caught by mistake but they still had to be prosecuted. Punishment commensurate with the time of arrest.
That is, if you are wrongly arrested and then detained, the Vietnamese courts will also try to figure out a crime to sentence. They would give a sentence equal to the time the litigant was detained.
Thus, the mistake here is due to the thinking that the courts in particular and the criminal procedure agencies in general are not wrong, that the state is never wrong, but if these agencies are wrong, the people would be the side bearing the consequence, not the state officials.
Someone compares it like this, there is a friend who owes my house VND1 billion even I don’t owe him at all. However, when it was later proven that I was not in debt, he told me to pay that amount to make up for the money he had lost. The fact that Vietnam’s judicial apparatus wrongfully arrests innocent people in detention, then finds a crime to declare them guilty, and then forces them to bear the penalty equal to the amount of time in detention, is an extremely effective way of unfair hearings.
The case of teacher Le Thi Dung being detained for 15 months, sentenced to 5 years in prison by the first-instance court for “wrong payment” of VND45 million ($2,000), is an act of trampling the law of the first-instance trial panel. At the appeal hearing, the investigators, those holding the decisive factors in the first instance court, and the people pulling the strings in this trial should be prosecuted, but over here, the appeal court did not accept the appeal of defendant Le Thi Dung, but they revised the first-instance sentence, reducing the defendant’s sentence from 5 years to 15 months in prison. This is a sentence equal to the time that Ms. Dung was detained until the day of appeal.
If the court judges unjustly, the court must compensate the wronged person. Why the court is wrong but innocent people bear their grievances? It is unclear what kind of justice this is, but it still blatantly exists today in Vietnam. For a long time, Vietnamese people have mocked that in Vietnam justice is only a comedian. In fact, justice in Vietnam is not only a cheap comedian, but also a tool to punish and match innocent people, or arbitrarily assign crimes to defendants without having enough solid evidence.
The Ho Duy Hai case is a stain on the Communist judiciary. It really makes the real face of the Communist judiciary from the past to the present, exposed in the most obvious way.
In the case of Ho Duy Hai, when listening to the report, everyone was terrified of the justice of this regime. The fingerprints at the scene did not match the suspect’s fingerprints, but authorities still tried to charge. People did not know why the Long An province’s Police Department threw away the knife found at the scene, then went to buy a knife from the market to replace it. The cutting board that was stained with the victim’s blood was also destroyed by the police and bought a replacement board from the market. The local police arbitrarily bought a chair in the market to replace the evidence chair at the scene. However, through 3 levels of trial, from the first instance, the appeal court and the cassation, those who control justice in Vietnam all gave him the death sentence.
The Ho Duy Hai case is still there. After this scandalous case, Chief Justice Nguyen Hoa Binh was elected to the Politburo and he gained more power. This is a testament to a jungle justice system, without any procedural principles, the trial is distorted according to the will of the judge in the court.
Someone commented that Vietnam’s judiciary is unfair, it is extremely dangerous. Instead, this sector should punish the guilty, on the contrary, it punishes the innocent and free the guilty. No one can enumerate all the unfair cases under this regime. People only know about it through a number of prominent cases, voiced by the online community. What about those who are unjustly unlucky to be put on the newspaper? Because they have to silently bear the sins that they did not commit. And it is these people who are the victims of evil judges like Nguyen Hoa Binh. The magistrates used the people to make achievements for them, they cause injustice for people while accelerating in their career path.
Thoibao.de (Translated)
