(Minghui.org) We recently hired a lawyer to represent a detained practitioner, but the outcome was not what we expected. I’d like to share our lessons with you.
After the practitioner was indicted, although we found a family member to present her as a non-lawyer defender, we also considered hiring a human rights lawyer, given the judge’s track record of appointing lawyers for practitioners and instructing them to enter a guilty plea.
Looking for a Lawyer
We contacted practitioners in other cities who had some experience hiring lawyers and asked if they had any recommendations. They gave us a few names but also told us that they hadn’t contacted those lawyers in a long time and they weren’t sure if they were still sympathetic towards Falun Dafa.
We called one lawyer who said he was available to meet in person the next day. When we met, the lawyer said many positive things about practitioners and that he was willing to travel a long distance for our case. Just one phone call was enough. He added that he wouldn’t take the case if it wasn’t for a Falun Dafa practitioner, since anyone else might even refuse to pay his travel expenses.
One practitioner told him how she’d been persecuted. The lawyer seemed to be very touched and had tears in his eyes. He said that he’d met a fortuneteller many years ago, who said that he had a sacred mission in this world. The lawyer felt his mission was to help Falun Dafa practitioners.
The lawyer claimed that he was one of the first lawyers to step forward to represent Falun Dafa practitioners in China and that he would only enter a not-guilty plea for us. Some of the cases he handled were reported on Minghui.org.
After the meeting, we felt the lawyer had strong sense of justice and we decided to hire him. But when we asked about a formal contract, the lawyer said it was not necessary. Because we didn’t want to challenge him, we agreed. So, without going over with him the specific tasks we wanted him to do, we paid him in full. This turned out to be a big mistake.
Reviewing the Case Documents
The next day, the lawyer went to the courthouse to review the practitioner’s case. But when we looked at the photos he took (he wasn’t allowed to make photocopies of the documents, but he could take photos), we were shocked to see that most of the photos were very blurry and some had some of the words cut off. One practitioner questioned whether the lawyer was taking this seriously and others said perhaps he didn’t know how to use a cellphone very well due to his age.
We’d heard that some lawyers would give a legal analysis of the case documents after reviewing them, such as how the authorities violated legal procedure when they arrested practitioners or fabricated evidence against them and then offer suggestions about what to do next. But this lawyer told us the practitioner’s case was very straightforward and nothing stood out, so we didn’t discuss it with him in depth.
Meeting the Practitioner
Shortly after this, the lawyer went to visit the practitioner in the detention center. We asked him to take Master’s new articles to the practitioner or read them to her.
After the visit, we asked the lawyer if he read the articles to the practitioner and if it helped strengthen her righteous thoughts. The lawyer didn’t give a direct answer. After we asked several times, he finally said he read a small portion of one article but that the practitioner was doing well and was in good spirits.
We asked the lawyer what we should do next. He didn’t give any solid suggestions, and just told us to wait for the trial. This wasn’t what we expected.
One practitioner asked if the lawyer would write a letter to the court, listing how the police violated the law in arresting the practitioner and demanding that the case be dismissed. The lawyer said it wasn’t necessary. He claimed that he didn’t want the court to know his arguments, since they might prepare something to refute them if they did.
We also asked the lawyer if we could make appointments with the judge or the police officer in charge of the case to discuss the case with them in person. But no matter what we proposed, the lawyer said we should not do it. Then we asked him if he had any suggestions about how to clarify the truth to the judge. He said if we had a personal connection with the judge, we could meet with him in private. But since we didn’t have any connections, the lawyer didn’t say anything else.
In the end, we gave him copies of the letters we’d written earlier to the procuratorate and court and asked him to give us some feedback on them. He took them and said he would take a look. We never heard back from him on this.
The Trial
When we received the notification of the practitioner’s hearing, we asked to see the lawyer’s defense statement, but he said that he couldn’t allow it. If the judge found out about it, he might just tell the lawyer to submit the statement without letting him read it in court. He also said it was important to “play it by ear” during the hearing. Although we didn’t like the lawyer’s answer, we still trusted him. We thought that he represented so many practitioners so he should know what he was doing.
Two days before the hearing, we asked the lawyer to meet with the practitioner to at least tell her to prepare for the hearing. He again said it wasn’t necessary. We had to ask the practitioner’s family defender to deliver the message to her.
The afternoon before the hearing, the lawyer showed us his defense statement. It turned out to be very weak and some of the content was for “cult members.” He even acknowledged the CCP’s claim that it was illegal to practice Falun Dafa in China.
We were shocked and realized that we needed to think about whether to have him represent the practitioner in court. We asked him if he could make some revisions to make it a stronger case. We provided a template published on Minghui and asked him to revise his statement based on that. He told us to prepare the statement and then he would review it. We didn’t agree.
Because we didn’t reach an agreement about the defense statement, we said we were dismissing him, but he didn’t agree and said he would work on the statement. But when we contacted him at 11 p.m. (the night before the trial), we realized that he hadn’t made any changes as he had promised.
In the end, we agreed to have him represent the practitioner in court. We thought that even if he wasn’t completely righteous, at least he still had a positive attitude about Dafa. We prepared a defense statement for him and asked him to read it in court. But he stuck with his own version and refused to change it when we reminded him. The entire session felt more like a show trial, and the results were not as we had hoped.
Reflections
Thinking back on it now, we realized that the lawyer did almost nothing we asked him to do. Yet we failed to see it earlier, still thinking that we had righteous thoughts and weren’t relying on the lawyer to do things for us.
The first mistake we made was to blindly believe the lawyer during the first meeting. It’s true that there were many reports about him on Minghui and he said many good things about Dafa. But we forgot that he was still an ordinary person, was therefore easily interfered with, and could change over time. Even when he said things that were not quite right, we didn’t catch it due to our blind trust in him.
We also realized that it was our responsibility to help the lawyer better fulfill his mission to represent practitioners, and we shouldn’t just stand back and watch him fail. On the surface, the lawyer was helping us seek justice using legal means. But looking at it from a higher level, he was waiting for us to save him.
One lesson we learned was that we failed to finalize a formal contract with the lawyer, which should have listed every little detail of that we wanted him to do, such as how many times he should visit the practitioner, how soon he should share with us the defense statement, and how to make the payments, as well as what should be done if he breached the contract. We should have taken the lead ourselves rather than let the lawyer tell us what to do.
We also asked each other why this happened. We realized that we didn’t take full responsibility for the rescue process ourselves. There were so many areas we should have followed up on more diligently or spent more effort on, but we didn’t do it due to our human hearts. I hope we can all learn from this lesson and do better in the future.
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