A former police officer in Vietnam’s Mekong Delta was arrested for embezzlement in 1982, and despite a lack of evidence required for prosecution, by the time of his death in 2011, his name still had not been cleared.

Nguyen Tung Chinh was born in 1950 and lived with his family in Duyen Hai District in Tra Vinh Province.

In 1982, while serving as chief of office at the police bureau of Duyen Hai District, which was then part of the old Cuu Long Province, Chinh was arrested after an investigation into alleged ‘embezzlement of property’, a crime he never admitted to committing.

In 1988, the People’s Procuracy of Cuu Long Province ordered his temporary release due to its failure to prove his guilt.

Returning home with an un-cleared criminal record, Chinh lived with the discrimination from his neighbors and employers for 29 years until his death in 2011.

The arrest

According to case files, Duyen Hai District police officers made several arrests of illegal border crossers in 1982, whose confiscated properties were kept at the police station where Chinh had access to the keys.

Nguyen Van Thuc, former deputy chief of Duyen Hai District Police who was Chinh’s superior at the time, said all of the confiscated properties had been found missing when a senior official asked Chinh to open the safe and let him borrow a watch to attend a convention.

As soon as Chinh opened the safe, Thuc recalled, he got startled when he said, “Sir, they’re all gone!”

The incident was immediately reported to the provincial police, who later estimated that the lost properties were worth 225 grams of gold.

Chinh was identified as the main suspect since he could not prove his innocence, and was detained for investigation into his ‘embezzlement of property’.

According to Thuc, regulations on key-keeping at the time were not as strict as they are now, and the value of confiscated property was not professionally appraised either.

Chinh never admitted to the crime, and not long before his death he was said to have told an old colleague of his with eyes full of tears, “Why do I have to endure all this when I have done nothing wrong?”

On January 25, 1988, over five years after his arrest, Chinh was temporarily released from detention due to the provincial People’s Procuracy’s inability to prove him guilty.

Failure to suspend the case due to missing police files

After his release, Chinh sent several complaints to authorities demanding the clearing of his name, but all was in vain.

In 1992, Cuu Long Province was divided into the current provinces of Tra Vinh and Vinh Long, and according to Chinh’s wife Huynh Thi Mai, 61, the two provinces have been kicking the ball back and forth to each other without taking responsibility for the case ever since.

In 2013, the Supreme People’s Procuracy of Vietnam ruled that the case was the responsibility of Vinh Long Province, but the provincial procuracy still refused to compensate Chinh or his family for the wrongful arrest, saying “Chinh never voiced his grievance when he was alive."

Speaking with Tuoi Tre (Youth) newspaper, Chief Procurator at Vinh Long Province People’s Procuracy Tran Dac Chien said, “[Chinh] didn’t raise his voice to prove his innocence during the investigation, so it’s partially his fault. If only he had, it would have been much easier for us.”

Explaining why the procuracy had not suspended the case despite a lack of evidence, Chien said it was due to missing police files after several instances of the merging and dividing of administrative units.

Lawyer Pham Minh Tri, a member of Tra Vinh Province Bar Association, said the maximum time for detention according to Vietnamese laws is 12 months, and the investigative body must suspend the case if no evidence proving the detainee’s guilt could be found after that time.

Therefore, Tri said, the detention of Chinh for more than five years without any conclusion or suspension of the investigation was completely unlawful.

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