For 39-year-old She Xianglin, this year could be the end of a nightmare.

The nightmare lasted for 11 years. The former security guard in Hubei Province was convicted of murdering his wife Zhang Zaiyu in 1994. But the sudden appearance of Zhang, alive and kicking last March, showed it was a horrible mistake.

In January of 1994, the couple had a domestic dispute and Zhang disappeared. Three months later, a female body was discovered at a nearby reservoir and Zhang's relatives identified it as the missing woman's remains.

After several rounds of interrogation, She "confessed" to killing his wife and was sentenced to death. But the Higher People's Court of Hubei ordered a retrial after finding clues that cast doubts on She's conviction. The sentence was changed to 15 years in prison.

If Zhang had not shown up, She could still be serving time in prison, bearing a lifelong infamy as a murderer.

The truth was that Zhang secretly fled from their home after the quarrel and remarried in Shandong Province.

"There is justice after all," said She after he was officially cleared of the crime in April. "I always believe the law is just even if I was wrongly jailed for so long."

She was set free. But the then 28-year-old youth had grown into a middle-aged man. The 11-year incarceration made She a stranger to the world.

He couldn't recognize his daughter, who had become a 17-year-old woman from a kid. His mother was dead and his brothers had moved elsewhere to make a living.

And She was luckier than some of the others who were found to be innocent only after they had been executed.

A wrong verdict ruins the prime time of a person's life as well as lives of his relatives. Meanwhile, it exposes several loopholes in China's judicial system.

The first is forced confession, which means some local police torture suspects into making a confession.

She said he was not allowed to sleep for 10 days and finally gave in by leaving his finger mark on documents which said he was guilty of murdering his wife.

"There is no problem with the law. But a few policemen who carry out the law have problems," She said.

The phenomenon of abuse during interrogation is not a rarity. From January to August last year, the Supreme People's Procuratorate dealt with more than 700 cases related to illegal detention and interrogation by torture.

"Although strictly forbidden by law, forced confession is common in many places because the police are often under great pressure from above to solve criminal cases," said Xinhua news agency.

If there was anything positive about She's tragedy, it was that it prompted faster reform of China's interrogation system. In the future, prosecutors must ask the suspect if he or she was forced to make a false confession and examine records made by the police to confirm there is no abuse.

The second loophole is the tendency of the police to judge a suspect as guilty instead of innocent at the very beginning.

In She's case, several witnesses reported to have seen Zhang alive. But the police simply ignored them.

They did not conduct a DNA test to identify the body but rushed to conclusion after Zhang's relatives said it was the missing woman.

The unsaid principle is to guarantee all the guilty are seized even at the cost of some innocent people. But "justice" carried out in such a way creates a huge injustice.

The case of She rings an alarm bell, urging police to respect the explanations offered by suspects in their defense.

Another issue is about compensation. She at last obtained 450,000 yuan (US$55,555), of which 250,000 yuan was state compensation for the wrong court verdict. The rest was from the local government.

The amount of compensation was based on the nation-wide average salary for eight hours a day. But She argued that he was behind bars day and night for 11 years and his mental agony was not taken into consideration.

She's initial demand was 4.37 million yuan in compensation, 88 percent of which was intended for his mental suffering.

It poses a new challenge to China's legal system, which does not define how to value mental anguish and how to compensate for that.

At a time when the central government is clearly against tortured conviction even as some local police do the opposite, isn't it urgent to let lawyers and reporters play a bigger role?

The voice of the weak would have been better heeded and, in She's case, it would not have taken 11 years to correct the mistakes, if lawyers were present and reporters could air the suspect's grievance.