vigilant TV

The Washington Post reports on the difficulties faced by Chinese criminal defense lawyers. Police and prosecutors routinely withold evidence, suspects are tortured, defense lawyers face the threat of perjury cases when the government loses, and acquitted defendants are often sent to re-education camps despite being found not guilty.

In a decade as a defense lawyer, [Mo Shaoping] has courted trouble by taking sides in some of China’s most sensitive cases. His clients have included the founder of the banned China Democracy Party, Xu Wenli, who was released from jail on Christmas Eve and flown to the United States. Another is the leader of worker protests this year in Liaoning province, Yao Fuxin, who remains in jail and has been denied his legal right to counsel. Mo has represented Internet essayists and capitalists-turned-dissidents.

The case that haunts him most is a murder investigation in a town in Hebei province called Renqiu, where police seeking confessions allegedly hung his clients from the wall by their wrists, shoved electric cattle prods into their mouths, squeezed their flesh with pliers and beat their legs as they squatted. “They have absolutely no proof. It was torture, pure and simple,” Mo said of the case, which has been grinding on for six years. “They all know it down there.”

Each case presents its unique challenges. On a recent weekday, for instance, Mo was in Haicheng, a grimy Manchurian town 500 miles northeast of Beijing, defending a police officer accused of dereliction of duty. In his last visit here, on Nov. 20, prosecutors had arrested all of Mo’s witnesses to block his defense. Worried that he, too, could end up in jail, Mo brought a group of reporters, one American among them, to Courtroom No. 4, an old meeting hall in the back of the Haicheng court. True to form, the prosecutor accused Mo of illegally telling witnesses how to testify, but did not arrest him.

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Since the criminal code was revised in 1997, more than 400 defense lawyers have been detained on perjury charges in cases that the state risked losing, sources at the All-China Lawyers Association said. Mo represents the most prominent of these: Zhang Jianzhong, head of the Beijing Lawyers Association’s committee on lawyers’ rights. In addition, following defeats in criminal cases, police routinely rearrest defendants and dispatch them—without trial—to labor camps.

– Washington Post, Defense Lawyers In China Find State Is Judge and Jury.