(Minghui.org) Mr. Cheng Jianli was tried in an Anhui Province court on Nov. 26 for his belief of Falun Gong. He appeared incoherent and absent-minded at the hearing.
The mother and wife of the defendant also noticed that he was extremely thin and looked quite different from his former appearance.
Mr. Cheng's attorney, who first noticed his client's strange mental condition, said that he was in good spirits and good health when he visited him on March 30.
The attorney has not been allowed to meet with his client again for the past eight months.
Mr. Cheng and his wife are both originally from Shanxi Province. He worked in Guangdong Province before his arrest in Hefei City, Anhui Province during a business trip on May 18, 2014. He was arrested because the authorities discovered that he was doing Falun Gong exercises in his hotel room. He has been detained since.
Before the trial, police came to his parents' and in-law's homes in Shanxi several times, repeatedly telling his family not to hire an attorney for him.
“Just tell your son to plead guilty,” they told Mr. Cheng's father. “Don't hire an attorney to defend him. He will come home... All he needs to do after that is to report to the police station once a month.”
Mr. Cheng's family still hired an attorney.
They suspected that Mr. Cheng's physical and mental changes were due to police abuse, which they had also suffered several times.
For example, after Mr. Cheng was arrested, his wife called her brother, who then said that he would hire an attorney for him. What they didn't realize was that their phone conversation was monitored. The next day, the authorities arrested her brother and detained him for two weeks on the charge of “gambling.”
Mr. Cheng's aunt was also harassed by the police.
Mr. Cheng's wife, after the arrest, had to take their two-year old son to move back to her parents' home, as she was not able to find a job to support her and her son.
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