Eugene Hoshiko/Associated Press
Police officers stood guard outside the Hefei Intermediate People’s Court on Thursday.
“The criminal facts are clear; the evidence is solid,” a court official said after the trial here in the provincial capital of Anhui Province, more than 800 miles from the scene of the crime in Chongqing. The formal guilty verdict will be announced at a later date.HEFEI, China — Worried that a longtime friend and business associate might harm her only child, Gu Kailai lured him to a rented villa in southwest China, plied him with alcohol until he could take no more and then, when he began to vomit and requested a drink of water, poured a poisonous concoction into his mouth.That, at least, is the prosecution’s version of what happened in a scandal that has riveted many in China and outside the country for months, presented in a neatly packaged capstone after a murder trial on Thursday that lasted, with a break for lunch, less than seven hours. Ms. Gu, the wife of the ousted party leader Bo Xilai , was said to have confessed to the murder of the British businessman, Neil Heywood. Her state-appointed defense lawyers asked for leniency.
Communist Party leaders clearly hoped the proceedings, which were closed to the foreign news media and shown on television only in carefully packaged snippets, would provide the Chinese public with a captivating spectacle, that would distract attention from the political scandal surrounding Ms. Gu’s husband, a populist leader who left a trail of corruption and abuse of power that deeply unnerved many of his fellow Politburo members. But if they hoped the trial would also showcase a more transparent, by-the-books legal system, they are likely to be disappointed.
Ms. Gu and her accomplice, Zhang Xiaojun, were deprived of their own legal counsel and forced to accept a government-appointed lawyer. No defense witnesses were produced during the trial. The defendants’ lawyers never had a chance to review the prosecution’s evidence.
In a bitter twist of fate, Ms. Gu, herself a lawyer, once expressed an unshakable faith in her nation’s legal system. In a book she wrote after visiting the United States in 1998 and successfully representing a Chinese company in a civil trial, she ridiculed the American justice system as doddering and inept. “They can level charges against dogs and a court can even convict a husband of raping his wife,” she wrote.
By contrast, China’s system was straightforward and judicious. “We don’t play with words and we adhere to the principle of ‘based on facts,’ ” she wrote. “You will be arrested, sentenced and executed as long as we determine that you killed someone.”
In fact, many legal analysts say, her trial will reinforce the widely held notion that despite three decades of legal reform, the Communist Party keeps an iron grip on many judicial proceedings and dictates a denouement that serves its political needs.
“This is not a trial that is likely to enhance China’s reputation for soft power,” said Jerome A. Cohen, an expert in Chinese law at New York University. “It’s not likely to improve foreign respect for China’s rule of law and human rights.”
To be sure, legal analysts and rights advocates say China has come a long way since the Maoist years, when justice was meted out according to the whims of Communist Party officials often unfamiliar with the niceties of criminal law. Since the 1980s, China has built hundreds of courthouses, opened dozens of law schools and produced legislation that, on paper, intricately describes the rights of defendants and sets out limits on the police.
Stéphanie Balme, an expert on China’s justice system at the Institut d’Études Politiques de Paris, said that ordinary Chinese had benefited enormously from such reforms. “For small civil disputes and ordinary justice, especially in regional cities, daily justice is much better,” she said. “But when it comes to criminal justice, especially big trials and ones that are political, there has been absolutely no fundamental change.”
With a conviction rate of 98 percent, Chinese prosecutors almost never lose. Indeed, Ms. Gu’s prosecution showcased the system’s ruthless efficiency. Weeks before the trial began, the official Xinhua news service telegraphed that the outcome had already been decided by announcing that the evidence was “irrefutable and substantial.”
Many legal analysts said the details that emerged on Thursday were undoubtedly decided weeks ago by senior leaders, who are eager to close the chapter on a scandal that has strained relations between Britain and China, and roiled the once-a-decade leadership transition scheduled for the fall.
“This trial is the outcome of a political struggle,” said Pu Zhiqiang, a defense lawyer, referring to powerful enemies of Mr. Bo, a brash up-and-comer who alienated many party luminaries. “Any trial to which the central party pays this much attention had no chance of being fair.”
The terse statement issued by the court on Thursday evening appeared to omit what those inside the courtroom said were far more detailed revelations about the crime.
According to several accounts, prosecutors said that Ms. Gu herself procured the poison, a commercially available product for exterminating animals, and that the dispute with Mr. Heywood centered on his efforts to strong-arm her son into paying approximately £13 million that he said he was owed to him after a joint business venture went bust. At one point, Mr. Heywood briefly detained the son, Bo Guagua, inside his home in England, and then sent a threatening e-mail to Ms. Gu demanding the money, a courtroom witnesses said. The e-mail, which was displayed in the courtroom, threatened to “destroy” him.
Prosecutors also said that Wang Lijun, a trusted aide of Mr. Bo’s, met with Ms. Gu a day after the murder and secretly recorded a conversation in which she discussed the crime. The courtroom accounts said that Mr. Wang had taken a blood sample from Mr. Heywood’s heart as potential evidence, although it tested negative for poison. Mr. Wang, fearing for his life, later sought refuge in the United States Consulate in Chengdu, where he reportedly revealed details of the murder to American officials.
Legal analysts said that the mitigating circumstances presented by the court — that Ms. Gu feared for the safety of her son — lessened the likelihood that she would face the death penalty but did not rule it out.
The court official here in Hefei, Tang Yigan, portrayed Ms. Gu as emotionally frail. He quoted her lawyers as saying that Ms. Gu’s “ability to control her own behavior was weaker than a normal person.” But Mr. Tang made a point of describing Ms. Gu as “healthy and emotionally stable” during the trial. The lawyers, he added, said that they hoped for leniency given that she had assisted the authorities with details about other people’s crimes.
Until now, coverage of the case had been drastically limited inside China, but on Thursday evening, CCTV reported on the trial with video from inside the courtroom. The three-minute segment showed Ms. Gu, smiling and wearing a black blazer over a white dress shirt, as she was led into the chambers. She appeared to have gained considerable weight, and a relative expressed shock, saying her face had changed dramatically since they had last met.
The camera lingered on two British consular officials in the courtroom. The British Foreign Office, other than saying it attended the trial to “fulfill our consular responsibilities to the Heywood family,” declined to comment on the case.
The CCTV newscaster added one significant new detail: that four police officials in Chongqing had been charged with helping Ms. Gu in a cover-up. Those officials will be tried on Friday.
By focusing exclusively on the murder, said Cheng Li, an expert on Chinese politics at the Brookings Institution, party leaders were able to avoid revealing details about the financial dealings of Ms. Gu and Mr. Bo, who has been held incommunicado for months but still enjoys support among certain factions of the leadership and ordinary Chinese.
The couple’s son did not return from the United States for the trial. He declined to discuss the case, but in a statement Wednesday confirmed that he had submitted witness testimony on behalf of his mother.
Li Xiaolin, a lawyer who was hired by Mr. Zhang’s family, was denied access to him. But he was allowed to attend the trial and said the state-appointed lawyers mounted a more vigorous defense than he had expected. Still, there were glaring holes in the prosecution’s case.
“I found the evidence presented in court was incomplete,” he said in an interview afterward. “Lots of pieces were missing.”
Edited By Cen Fox Post Team
