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Judge Attempts to Stop Wrongfully Convicted Falun Gong Practitioner from Filing Appeal

Sept. 7, 2017 |   By a Minghui correspondent in Jiangsu Province

(Minghui.org) A resident in Haimen City was sentenced to two years in prison for posting information about Falun Gong, a spiritual discipline being persecuted by the Chinese communist regime.

Mr. Ye Weidong’s family asked to have a copy of the verdict, but judge Lu Weidong said he’d not give them any copies if they planned to file an appeal against the sentence.

This is not the first time that Mr. Ye has been targeted for his faith. Back in April 2011, he was arrested for posting articles by Falun Gong practitioners on social media and sentenced to 4 years in prison in March 2012. His sister and brother were also given prison terms for reposting his articles.

Police kept monitoring Mr. Ye’s social media activities after he was released from prison in August 2014. They descended upon his home at 12:30 a.m. one October day in 2016 after discovering that he had posted Falun Gong articles on several forums.

Mr. Ye was tried on August 28, 2017 and sentenced to prison the next day. Judge Lu cited Mr. Ye’s prior prison sentence as evidence that he was a repeat offender.

Mr. Ye argued that no law in China criminalizes Falun Gong and that he was exercising his constitutional rights when he posted Falun Gong information on social media. He vowed to appeal his sentence.