Yu Haidong, a clean-cut, handsome young man, was executed by the Chinese state on Oct. 14, 2008 when he was 28 years old. Two years later, his mother, Zhu’s Jingru, a medical doctor from Xuzhou City, Jiangsu Province still has strong feelings of bereavement and disdain for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and its legal system in which her family had trusted all their lives.
“We lost our only child because we blindly trusted in the CCP,” she said.
“I will spend the rest of my life exposing the evil of the government and the judicial and legal systems, so that they can not destroy someone’s life again,” Zhu told the global independent Chinese media Kanzhongguo (Secret China) in an interview on Dec. 29, 2010.
According to the Secret China report, 24-year-old Yu Haidong and his girlfriend Du Wei went out at 11 p.m. on Feb. 14, 2005 after getting a phone call to help settle a fight. Two of Yu’s friends, Liu Lei and Gong Wei, had been badly beaten up by the waiters and gatekeeper at the Catwoman Bar several weeks previously. Now they wanted to take revenge and were calling people to help them settle the score.
Yu got lost on the way and was the last to get to the scene where a bloody knife fight was already going on. Liu and Gong had stopped the waiters’ cars and were stabbing them with knives. Yu joined in the fight and returned home at midnight.
The next day police arrested Yu and two others. They were told that one man had died from the stabbing.
Liu and Gong had run away and gone into hiding. It was several months before police found them.
All evidence and testimony pointed to Liu being the killer. But Liu pinned the crime on Yu, and the court went along with Liu and convicted Yu of the murder.
The court ignored the key evidence that Yu used a big chopping knife in the fight, whereas the victim was slashed by a small, sharp knife, such as the one Liu had used.
Yu was given the death penalty in the Xuzhou District Court, and the sentence was upheld by the Jiangsu High Court in a second trial.
Liu was sentenced to eight years in prison. It was said that Liu’s family were well-known gangsters in Xuzhou and had good connections to the Procuratorate.
The rest of the defendants got a slap on the wrist.
Bribing Judges
During the investigation stage, Yu’s girlfriend and several of Yu’s friends had told Zhu that other defendants had given bribes to the judges, and if she did not do the same, Yu would be used as the scapegoat. Zhu wanted to do so but her father-in-law objected.
“My father-in-law, after learning that his grandson was arrested, told us not to bribe or ask help from anyone. He told us not to be corrupted and to trust that the truth would come out. He said that only those who knew that they were guilty would use bribes.
“I told him that society is corrupted, and if we didn’t bribe like others, his grandson would become the scapegoat,” she said.
Then her father-in-law became angry and told Zhu, “If you are saying that this society and the system are corrupt, leave this house!”
Thereafter, the use of bribes was not discussed in the family, and none were offered to the judges on Yu’s behalf.
Execution
Yu was executed on Oct. 14, 2008.
During the three and a half years that passed from when he was detained to when he was executed, his family was not allowed to visit him or even talk to him.
“The day we were told that he had been killed, we went to the court and asked to see his body. The court staff gave us a piece of paper and told us to retrieve Yu’s ashes from the crematory. We went to the crematory and the people there told us to come back the next day to get the ashes. This means that Yu had not been cremated at the time we got there. Why would they not let us see the body? We did not know what was going on. We suspected that his organs were taken and sold for profit,” Zhu said.
The Law
Zhu’s view of the matter is that her son was executed because her family had too much confidence in the CCP.
“We believed that the system truly carries out the laws based on facts and would not profane the laws. To our surprise, the judges made up the facts and forged testimonies. We trusted in the law, and that’s how we got our child killed,” Zhu said.
According to Zhu, one of the defense lawyers, Sun Guoxiang, stated in his argument that there was not a shred of evidence that Yu was the killer. Another lawyer Liu Wei also believed that Yu was wrongfully executed and went to Beijing with Zhu to appeal for Yu’s case.
However Liu told Secret China on the telephone: “We respect the court’s decision. We proposed raised our doubts in the case. The court took everything into consideration. It is true that there were contradictions in the case, but it is also true that contradictions happen in a lot of cases.”
Liu declined to disclose specific information about the case, saying: “Our legal firm has regulations in this regard. For one, we cannot accept interviews over the telephone; and two, we cannot accept interviews from overseas media, especially in cases involving a death sentence.”
Exposing the Truth
Zhu has decided that she would dedicate the rest of her life to expose the truth about her son’s case. “My child must not have died in vain. I will expose the dark side of the systems so that they cannot kill people like scything grass.”
Zhu said her biggest regret is that she was not able to see her son before he was executed.
“He is our only child. His death hit us hard. He probably wanted to see us before being executed and wondered how miserable we would be without him,” she said.
Trusting the Party
Zhu said her husband’s parents used to be in the Liberation Army and have been members of the CCP since the 40s. Her father-in-law was the director of a hospital. They trusted in the CCP.
But since his grandson has been executed, her father-in-law has felt sorrow and anger every day. Zhu said he passed away last December 2009 and called out Yu’s name right before he died.
“We believed in the CCP and served it our entire lives. We followed the government’s policies, got married late, gave birth late. In the end, they sacrificed my son because of greed and brought desolation to my family,” she said.
Rampant Judicial Corruption
In an earlier article The Epoch Times reported that China’s judges have become targets of deadly assaults, and these attacks reflect people’s rage over judicial injustice in China.
The article quotes former Chinese judge Grace Li saying: “China does not have an independent judicial system. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) acts as an institution that is above the law. A director of a court frequently is obligated to also hold a concurrent post as Party secretary of the court and is supervised by officials of the same level at the Commission of Politics and Law of the Communist Party of China Central Committee. The financing and budget of a court are controlled by local government. Accordingly, courts are submissive to the Party and exercise their judicial functions in ways that ensure their [financial] survival. Meanwhile, the Party allows judges at all levels to be extremely corrupt.”
Li said that driven by political and economic interests, different levels of judges, just like different levels of local government officials, are indifferent to the public’s welfare and interests. With power and money, justice can be put aside. Therefore, bribery is rampant in China’s judicial system and officials closely collaborate to protect their own vested interests.
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Read the original Chinese article.
