Chinese Citizen Journalist Sentenced to 4-Years for COVID-19 Reporting

On the first business day of the year, Zhang Zhan, a 37-year old former lawyer, was sentenced to 4-years in Shanghai, China for her dogged reporting about how the Chinese Communist Party handled the world's initial outbreaks of the COVID-19 virus. She is one of several journalists who have disappeared, only to reappear in court to face criminal charges; the Chinese government has a 99.5% conviction rate. 

Her official charges were, "picking quarrels and provoking trouble". Her indictment accused her of publishing a large cache of "fake" information and interacting with foreign media outlets. Interestingly, Ms. Zhan had been charged with "picking quarrels and provoking trouble" twice in 2019; but the indictment shed no light on the details of  the pair of prior incidents. Here is a copy of her original indictment, in Chinese. 

According to Amnesty International, Ms. Zhan has been on a hunger strike for the past 5-months; AI says she has been force-fed through feeding tubes and may have been tortured in other ways. Here is the complete AI report.

Leading up to her trial, she was shackled 24-hours a day. She had to be brought into court in a wheelchair to face her accusers; she defiantly refused to participate in the "trial", saying it was insulting. The BBC reported she was "psychologically exhausted".

In China, prosecutors typically resort to charges of "picking quarrels and provoking trouble" whenever they need to silence government critics like Ms. Zhan. Journalists, dissidents, and human rights activists are all subject to these handy charges.

Ms. Zhan's trial no doubt went like 99.9% of all Chinese criminal trials: guilty as charged. In the sentencing phase of such cases, punishment is harsh. Ms. Zhan, for example, will now do 48-months in a Chinese prison, presumably the Pudong New District Detention Centre in Shanghai. As far back as March 2020, Ms. Zhan clashed with authorities when she bucked the official Communist Party line of encouraging so-called "gratitude education" recognizing the efforts of party leaders in containing the pandemic.

Zhan's Twitter handle and Youtube channel streamed content and videos of the crisis in real time. The videos were smuggled out of China through virtual private networks. Twitter and Youtube are banned in China; Zhan also posted some of her videos to the Chinese social media network WeChat.

Before her arrest, she was able to video a crowded hospital, a crematory, and a community health center. In other videos, she interviewed people on the street for their reactions to the government's handling of the pandemic; she sprinkled critical editorial throughout. 

Prior to the COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan, China in January, Ms. Zhan was not even a citizen journalist; she had been a lawyer. The New York Times described her as a stubborn and idealistic Christian; she reportedly quoted this passage from I Corinthians: "God is faithful, who will not suffer you to be tempted above that ye are able." One of Ms. Zhan's more fervent concerns was the fate of other now-missing journalists she met while reporting on the Communist Party's handling and early containment of the virus. 

Probably because the Party had its hands full with containing the pandemic, Zhan was able to move freely about Wuhan to create, smuggle, and post content. According to the NYT, she was able to fly under the Party radar because she was a small citizen journalist with a very small following.  Apparently, she acquired a higher profile when she began inquiring at police stations about the missing journalists. In China, that will do it every time. 

She went missing in mid-May 2020 and popped-up over 400-miles away in a Shanghai courtroom in December. Very difficult to fathom that, if she outlives her hunger strike, Ms. Zhan will not embark upon a 4-year prison term for simply recording information about the pandemic.

The Communist Party judge that sentenced Zhan for documenting a public health crisis was, no doubt, impressed with her meddlesome character, as evidenced by her two prior charges from 2019. She apparently failed to show the proper deference to the government's efforts to combat the virus; she did not buy into her neighborhood "gratitude education". 

Of course, this is nothing new for China and the Chinese Communist Party; a locked-down centrally-controlled communist governmental system with a very singular focus: the survival and advancement of the Party. Free critical thought is criminalized and repressed as it has always been in China. 

Ms. Zhan's courage to document government action may prove disproportionately effective in shedding light on an always shifty regime. 

The blogger, Timothy P. Flynn, owns and operates Clarkston Legal, a general practice law firm.  

Judge Cannot Repress a Motor City Original

Attorney Marvin Barnett

In the Frank Murphy Hall of Justice, attorney Marvin Barnett is a fixture. He's been defending Detroiters accused of felonies in that building for three decades.

No stranger to federal court, Mr. Barnett was involved in a gun case in Ann Arbor a while ago. During the case, Barnett began to crank-up his usual righteous cross-examination when U.S. District Judge John O'Meara stated:

This dramatic, high voice, moving around, touching your client. It isn’t going to happen. You went into a whole series of pretty dramatic questions about what happened, who opened the door, who pulled it open. It had nothing, nothing to do with what this jury has got to decide and you’re getting back into some other areas. Now you are a very intelligent man and you know what I’m talking about and you know you’re going to be sanctioned if this continues so don’t let it continue.

Judge O'Meara, in front the jury, also characterized Barnett's requested jury instructions as, "a little bit of flim-flam", before telling the Motor City lawyer to "shut-up" during his closing argument. The judge also scolded Barnett that he was not listening to the court, and that Barnett was wasting the jury's time.

Perhaps the court's crowning insult to Barnett, however, was when Judge O'Meara belittled his theory of the case -that the officer involved had a reason to lie- as being outright "over-the-top mendacity".  In addition, when the jury sent out a note stating they were "hung" on the weapons charge because of confusion about the meaning of "reasonable doubt", the court instructed them to continue deliberating and provided this improvised instruction:

Reasonable doubt is something short of absolute certainty by some measurable distance. It means that if you have reasonable doubt, that there is no way a reasonable person can come to the conclusion that you need them to come to, to in this case find the Defendant guilty of two charges. 

While the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals characterized O'Meara as "fair-minded", they found his series of belittling remarks prejudiced the jury against the defendant and reversed his conviction last week, remanding the case to the district court for a new trial. In doing so, the Sixth Circuit also concluded that the lower court improperly improvised the definition of "reasonable doubt" following the jury's request to have that term better explained.

So now Barnett's client gets a second chance at acquittal. Most prosecutors would agree that giving Marvin Barnett a second chance is something to avoid.

www.motorcitylegal.com

Detroit in Mid-2015

Since 2009, our lawyers have been generating law-related blog content. This is our newest creation; the very first post of the Motor City Law Blog.

Our law firm has developed many blogs; some are theme specific covering topics like divorce and criminal defense; others cover broader topics of legal interest.

In this blog, all posts will have a visceral connection to Detroit. Detroit has been bashed, smashed and abused. Now there is nowhere for Detroit to go but up. One thing about this city is that it always holds its head-up high.

The last few years have brought Detroit to its knees financially and politically; this year, we emerged from bankruptcy; just a few years ago, we saw a former mayor sentenced to 18-years prison in federal court. A new mayor, Mike Duggan, was the first white politician to be elected mayor in Detroit since the mid-1960s; he was a write-in candidate.

With this first post, we wanted to take stock in Detroit by focusing on a few statistics unearthed during the focus on the bankruptcy of our fair city. We will then seek out stories of interest, always with some legal angle and hopefully of interest to our readers.

We promise to be short; we promise to be sweet. We will scour our news feeds for Detroit-related meat; we will post the information and serve-up our connection. Hopefully, this will be of interest to our readers. In doing so, it is our avowed mission to add value, however minuscule, to our fair city.

We cannot promise that all the posts will be positive as this is not a dreamer’s blog; this is a blog about an ancient gritty city situated along the banks of the Detroit River and placed at the heart of the Great Lakes state. This is a blog about a once and future world-class city with the blue-collar blood of the original equipment manufacturers running through its veins.

So here is one set of measurements of Detroit in mid-2015, as we take its volatile temperature in this first post:

• When Detroit filed bankruptcy two years ago, it was $18 billion in debt, against only $1.5 billion in average annual revenue;
• Of the $11.4 billion in unsecured debts, nearly 80% was for employee pensions and health insurance coverage;
• The average retiree had an annual pension income of $19,000;
• The average pensioner received a 4.5% reduction in their benefit, but a 90% cut in health care coverage;
• Despite these reductions, 70% of the pensioners voted in support of the final bankruptcy plan;
• Police response time, nearly an hour pre-bankruptcy, has been cut to 18-minutes -the national average is 11-minutes;
• 2/3s of Detroit's ambulances were disabled on any given day; this has been cut to half of the fleet;
• Despite a largely disabled fleet, since emerging from bankruptcy, the average response time for an ambulance is now about 12-minutes;
• 40% of the city's streetlights do not function, with vandalism and age equally responsible;
• 78,000 abandoned structures lie within the city limits, with an average cost of $10,000 to demolish a single-family residence;
• homicides have fallen-off by 18%, with 72% of the cases getting closed.

No doubt, a tough road lies ahead. Stay tuned and lend a hand...

www.motorcitylegal.com