JINHA

NEWS CENTER – On Friday, Chinese courts announced the reversal of the death sentence for Li Yan, who killed her husband after suffering through his abuse for more than a year.

The Higher People’s Court in Sichuan announced in a Friday decision that Li Yan’s experience of violence was a factor in the decision to convert her sentence to what will likely be life in prison.

Li was one of the one in three women in China who are abused by their partners. Shortly after Li Yan married Tan Yong in 2009, he began physically and sexually abusing her, frequently threatening her life by leaving her outside in the cold and subjecting her to a range of painful forms of torture. Yan repeatedly asked for help from police and those responsible and was hospitalized at one point, but no officials followed up on her case. On November 3, 2010, when Tan Yong began pistol-whipping Yan and threatening to kill her, she struck him on the head, killing him. Yan later turned herself in.

Yan received the death sentence in 2011, but a campaign by feminists succeeded in pressuring the court to retry her case. Although women’s rights activists say her case should not have been tried as a murder to begin with, the new result has been perceived as a positive development. Lawyers have said that new laws on domestic violence in China are responsible in part for the resentencing.

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