(Minghui.org) The motion to reconsider her wrongful sentencing filed by a former middle school teacher in Yunnan Province was recently accepted by the Yunnan Provincial High Court and Xishuangbanna Prefecture Procuratorate.
Ms. Zhao Chenyu, 59, used to teach at the Kunming City 30th Middle School. She began to practice Falun Gong in 1998, a year before the Chinese communist regime ordered the persecution. Her school fired her in 2005, while she was serving a three-year prison term for not renouncing her faith. She was sentenced again to four years in 2018. Her appeal was rejected and she never received a response to her motion to reconsider her case. After she was released in August 2022, she filed the motion again to reconsider her case and finally got it docketed.
Arrest and Sentencing
Ms. Zhao, a resident of Kunming City, visited her mother in Jinghong City, Xishuangbanna Prefecture in the same province of Yunnan in early August 2018. She returned home on August 24, only to be arrested at home around 9 a.m. three days later, by nine plainclothes officers who travelled from the Jinghong City about 320 miles away. The Jinghong City police suspected that she was the woman they saw in a surveillance video distributing Falun Gong materials and chased her all the way to Kunming.
Only one officer flashed his ID in front of Ms. Zhao, but he put it back before she could see his name. The police handcuffed her behind her back and restrained her in the sofa in the living room. They spent five hours searching her home and used her storage boxes to haul away the many personal items confiscated from her, without going over the items with her. After they were done at 2 p.m., they took Ms. Zhao to the Dongluqiao Police Station in Kunming. She was transferred to the Kunming City Detention Center that evening and taken to the Xishuangbanna Prefecture Detention Center two days later.
Around the same time, another group of officers in Jinghong ransacked the homes of Ms. Zhao’s mother and son. Her mother, Ms. Meng Yunying, was given 15 days of detention and fined 1,000 yuan. Due to her advanced age, the police didn’t detain her. However, the mental pressure of the police harassment took a toll on the elderly woman’s health. She fell at home and hurt her femur. She was hospitalized and passed away on November 16, 2019.
The Jinghong City Police Department submitted Ms. Zhao’s case to the Mengla County Procuratorate. She made two court appearances at the Mengla County Court on May 6 and July 26, 2019, before being sentenced to four years with a 40,000-yuan fine. She appealed with the Xishuangbanna Intermediate People’s Court, which ruled to uphold her original verdict. She was transferred to the Yunnan Province Women’s Prison on June 23, 2020.
Seeking Justice
Because Ms. Zhao refused to renounce Falun Gong, the prison guards put her on strict management and did not give her paper and pen to write the motion to reconsider her case. She never gave up her efforts to seek justice though. After managing to get the pen and paper and finishing writing the motion, she finally put it in the procuratorate’s mailbox in the prison in early 2022, despite the guards’ multiple attempts to stop her. She prepared an additional copy of the motion and planned to take it with her after she was released. But that copy and other legal documents she prepared were all confiscated by the inmates and never returned to her. She also received no response to her motion.
After Ms. Zhao was released in August 2022, she wrote another copy of the motion and mailed it to the Xishuangbanna Intermediate People’s Court on November 6, 2023. Although the court accepted it on November 23, it ruled on November 29 to reject her motion and stick to their earlier decision to uphold her original verdict.
Ms. Zhao on January 26, 2024 filed another motion with the Yunnan Provincial High Court, which has accepted her case.
Meanwhile, the motion she filed with the Supreme People’s Procuratorate in November 2023 was transferred to the Yunnan Provincial Procuratorate, which has further delegated it to the Xishuangbannan Prefecture Procuratorate. The latter accepted it on April 8, 2024.
In her motion, Ms. Zhao demanded the Xishuangbannan Prefecture Intermediate Court reverse their decision to reject her appeal of her wrongful sentencing and acquit her. She also requested the authorities to return her personal items confiscated from her, provide her with financial compensation and bring the perpetrators involved in her case to justice. She also detailed the torture she suffered at the prison in the motion.
Related Reports:
Tortured for Four Years: Kunming Teacher Persecuted for Her Faith
Former Teacher Sentenced to Prison for Her Faith, Mother Passes Away after Police Harassment
Once Imprisoned for Three Years, Former Teacher Again Faces Indictment For Her Faith
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