(Clearwisdom.net) Huanggu District Court in Shenyang City, Liaoning Province, set a February 6, 2009, trial date for six Falun Gong practitioners. That day, all of them pleaded innocent. Their families had hired a group of lawyers from Beijing to defend them.
Two days before the trial, on the 4th, all the lawyers involved in the case received phone calls from officials at the Shenyang City Judicial Bureau, warning them not to enter an innocent plea for their clients. Two lawyers couldn't withstand the pressure. They resigned and promised to return the retainer the families had paid them.
The other lawyers were not intimidated. They went a step further, even, and demanded the Judicial Bureau furnish them with written documents, justifying their threats. Since there were no such documents in the first place, the judicial bureau didn't get its way, and the lawyers insisted on going ahead with their defense.
Judicial Bureau officials called the lawyers' Beijing firms, attempting to find out their IDs and home addresses, but none of the firms complied.
On February 5, 2009, two lawyers were summoned to the Judicial Bureau "for a talk."
I'd like to share some thoughts with Shenyang practitioners about why such interference occurred.
As Dafa practitioners, we should look within when encountering problems. These lawyers were greatly interfered with. Was this a manifestation of the evil's fear, or a result of the evil exploiting our loopholes?
On November 22, 2008, certain Beijing lawyers defended practitioners Chen Xinye and Zhao Zhanbo, who pleaded innocent. With support from the two practitioners' families and Shenyang practitioners' righteous thoughts, the defense went well and encouraged everyone greatly.
A few practitioners who still had many human notions and longed for an end to the persecution developed zealotry and dependence as a result. They wanted to count on righteous lawyers to help end the persecution and rescue sentient beings. Their underlying problem was that they still viewed the persecution as a simple suppression of human beings by human beings.
I wonder whether the authorities took advantage of these omissions? We have had numerous lessons to learn from throughout all these years of persecution--that any human notion could cause us unnecessary losses.
I hope practitioners concerned with these matters soon correct their thinking and actively participate in truth-clarification activities to eliminate the evil and offer sentient beings salvation.