Ms. Liang Yuzhen Sentenced to Four and a Half Years in Prison

Name: Liang Yuzhen
Gender: Female
Age: 41
Address: Shaping Town, Heshan City, Jiangmen, Guangdong Province
Occupation: Unknown

Date of Most Recent Arrest: February 25th, 2009
Most recent place of detention: Heshan Detention Centre
City: Heshan City
Province: Guangdong Province
Persecution Suffered: Imprisonment, beatings, physical constraint
Defence Attorney: (Tang Jitian), (Li Chunfu)

Ms. Liang Yuzhen was arrested by police from the Yayo Police Station at approximately 3:00 p.m. on February 25th, 2009, as she was handing out Falun Gong leaflets exposing the persecution to people in the countryside. The police obstructed her lawyers from seeing her, and she was subsequently sentenced to four and half years in prison. She is still being held in the Heshan Detention Centre.

On April 2nd, Ms. Liang's 98-year-old grandmother hired two lawyers, Mr. Tang Jitian and Mr. Li Chunfu, from the Anhui Law Firm and the Gaobolonghua Law Firm in Beijing respectively, to defend her granddaughter. When they arrived at the detention centre in Heshan to see Ms. Liang, they were refused by the police.

Without any legal basis or judicial process, Ms. Liang was sentenced to a four and a half year prison term. The authorities didn't even inform her family of their ruling. Although Ms. Liang tried to appeal to the People's Intermediate Court she had never received any response regarding her appeal.

On October 15th, Ms. Liang's family went to see her in the detention centre for the first time, and they found that she had lost a lot of weight.

On February 25th, Ms. Liang was brutally beaten because she refused to co-operate with officers who wanted to take her picture. While detained, she was locked up for a week because she persisted in practising the Falun Gong exercises.

Ms. Liang's family had difficulty eating and sleeping after she was arrested, and they worried about her personal safety.

Ms. Liang, who is 41 years old and single, started practising Falun Gong in April 1999. She has benefited from the practice both physically and mentally, and her ten-plus years of cervical inflammation disease disappeared shortly after she took up the practice. After the Chinese Communist Party started persecuting Falun Gong on July 20th, 1999, Ms. Liang and her younger sister were repeatedly arrested, detained and jailed.

Ms. Liang's parents are Hong Kong residents. Her siblings became very upset and grief-stricken upon hearing of their sisters' persecution. Ms. Liang's 98-year-old grandmother is also suffering as a result of Ms. Liang's situation.

Chinese version available at http://minghui.ca/mh/articles/2009/10/19/210664.html