Guangdong Woman Sentenced to Sixteen Months for Distributing Materials about Her Faith
(Minghui.org) A Shenzhen City, Guangdong Province resident was recently sentenced to sixteen months and fined 3,000 yuan for her faith in Falun Gong, a mind-body practice that has been persecuted by the Chinese Communist Party since 1999.
Ms. Shi Peiling
Ms. Shi Peiling, 67, was arrested at home on April 24, 2019. The police confiscated her family’s passports, other IDs, and 4,000 yuan in cash.
Gao Zhan, the prosecutor from Nanshan District Procuratorate, indicted Ms. Shi in October, accusing her of passing out two copies of informational materials about Falun Gong.
Ms. Shi appeared in the Nanshan District Court on January 16, 2020. Her lawyer entered a not-guilty plea on her behalf. The lawyer pointed out that the police violated legal procedure by ransacking her home without a search warrant and fabricating a witness account – as the location where Ms. Shi distributed the materials described by witness Fan Jianfeng was different from that from the surveillance video.
The lawyer also emphasized that the law has never criminalized Falun Gong and that the ban on Falun Gong publications was lifted by the Chinese Publication Bureau in 2011. Even if Ms. Shi did pass out materials about Falun Gong as alleged, she still would not have broken any law.