Sentenced to Prison Inside a Car, Inner Mongolian Woman’s Case Is Retried

(Minghui.org) A Chifeng City, Inner Mongolia woman who was sentenced inside a car recently had her case retried after it was returned by the intermediate court.

Ms. Duan Lianying was first arrested on January 2, 2018, while distributing informational materials about Falun Gong, a spiritual discipline that has been persecuted by the Chinese communist regime since 1999. A plainclothes officer pretending to be a passersby deceived her into giving him a copy of the materials. The police ransacked her home two days later and took her to the Songshan District Detention Center.

Ms. Duan held a hunger strike to protest the persecution and was released on January 10. She then lived away from home to avoid further harassment.

While officer Huo Junchao and others were monitoring another practitioner, Ms. Yu Guilan, they saw in the surveillance video that Ms. Duan had gone to visit Ms. Yu. The police tracked down Ms. Duan and monitored her as well.

Ms. Duan was arrested again around December 12, 2019, and held at the same Songshan District Detention Center.

The Songshan District Court held a hearing in October 2020. As she insisted on hiring a lawyer to represent her, the judge forcibly dragged her from the courtroom to a car and then proceeded to sentence her to three years in prison.

Ms. Duan appealed with the Chifeng City Intermediate Court, which initially indicated that they would uphold her original sentence. But with Ms. Duan’s persistent effort to seek justice in the past few months, the higher court returned the case and ordered a retrial.

The Songshan District Court held another hearing of Ms. Duan’s case on May 31, 2021. Her lawyer entered a not guilty plea for her. He argued that no law criminalizes Falun Gong in China and that Ms. Duan didn’t violate any law in distributing materials about Falun Gong. The prosecutor still pushed to sentence her to prison.

Ms. Duan is now awaiting the new verdict at the detention center, where she has been held for 1.5 years.

Perpetrators’ contact information:
Songshan District Procuratorate: [phone], [phone], [phone]Li Fengxiang (李凤祥), director of Songshan District Court: [phone], [phone]Li Ying (李英), head of Hongshan District Police Department: [phone], [phone]

(More perpetrators’ contact information is available in the original Chinese article.)

Related report:

Judge Drags Inner Mongolia Woman to a Car and Sentences Her to Prison