The Huỳnh Văn Nén Double Wrongful Conviction

The murder of Lê Thị Bông

Lê Thị Bông was killed in Hàm Tân District, Bình Thuận Province, in April 1998. Contemporary reports differ on the precise April date, so this page does not present a single day as undisputed. Huỳnh Văn Nén was arrested on May 17, 1998 and accused of killing Bông and taking property from her.

Nén later said that admissions attributed to him had been coerced. In 2000, the Bình Thuận Province People's Court convicted him of Bông's murder and robbery and imposed a life sentence.

A second murder conviction

During the investigation into Bông's death, police also accused Nén and members of his wife's family of involvement in the 1993 killing of Dương Thị Mỹ, a case often referred to in Vietnamese reporting as the cashew-orchard case.

Nén received an additional six-year sentence in connection with Mỹ's murder, while nine relatives were also prosecuted. That case was later recognized as a wrongful prosecution. The relatives were cleared, but Nén remained imprisoned because the separate conviction for Bông's murder was still in force.

The Bông conviction unravels

Years of petitions and legal advocacy kept the Bông case under scrutiny. In September 2014, the Supreme People's Court quashed the lower-court judgment against Nén and ordered a reinvestigation.

Investigators later identified Nguyễn Thọ as a suspect in Bông's killing. Thọ surrendered and confessed. In 2016, a court convicted him of murder and robbery and sentenced him to 20 years in prison. Reporting on the case said an accomplice had died years earlier.

Nén is cleared

Nén was released after nearly seventeen years in custody as the case against him collapsed. In December 2015, Bình Thuận judicial and police authorities publicly apologized for the miscarriage of justice.

The significance of the case extends beyond a single mistaken conviction: Vietnamese state media described Nén as the country's only person known to have been wrongfully convicted in two murder cases.

Compensation and legal status

In January 2017, the Bình Thuận People's Court announced an agreement to compensate Nén VND10 billion for the wrongful imprisonment and its consequences.

The two underlying homicides do not have identical sourced outcomes. Bông's murder ultimately produced a conviction of Nguyễn Thọ. The sources reviewed for this file establish that Nén and his relatives were wrongfully convicted or prosecuted in the Mỹ case, but do not provide an equally clear later conviction of another perpetrator for Mỹ's death. For that reason, Crime by Region places this file in Unsolved / Partial while clearly recording Nén's exoneration.