(Minghui.org) Falun Gong practitioners Mr. Shi Bingjun and Ms. Pu Ruijing were sentenced to five and seven years in prison respectively on May 8, 2015. They were tried at a district court in Wuxi City, Jiangsu Province.
Mr. Shi’s lawyer delivered a “not guilty” plea, despite the judge’s repeated interruptions. The judge also barred Mr. Shi from speaking.
Mr. Shi was stopped by a security guard in the Donggang district when he was out cycling on the evening of October 10, 2013. This was four months after his release from a labor camp.
The guard found him in possession of several Falun Gong informational DVDs. He was arrested and taken to the Wuxi No.1 Detention Center. The police ransacked his home twice and confiscated his computer and printer.
Binhu District Procuratorate rejected his case several times due to a lack of evidence, but eventually proceeded to charge him.
Ms. Pu was detained later that month when she was implicated because of the items police confiscated from Mr. Shi's home.
Mr. Shi Repeatedly Detained
Mr. Shi, in his 40’s, is a graduate from Beihang University. He began to practice Falun Gong in Japan where he was a graduate student. After July 1999 when the Chinese Communist Party began to persecute Falun Gong, he returned to China to appeal for the right to practice.
He has been held in a brainwashing center once and sentenced to a forced labor camp three times.
During his detention at the Wuxi Brainwashing Center, he was forced to stand for long periods of time, and was deprived to sleep for days. His feet became so swollen that his shoes had to be cut open.
He was taken to the Fangqiang Forced Labor Camp in 2000, 2005 and 2011. The guards instigated inmates to beat him repeatedly and deprived him of sleep. Mr. Shi started a hunger strike to protest the abuse.
