BEIJING — Before they married in 2009, Tan Yong admitted to Li Yan that he had beaten his three previous wives. He promised to change.
The promises didn’t last, said Li Dehuai, Ms. Li’s brother. Soon after the wedding, Mr. Tan began abusing his wife.
“He stubbed out cigarettes on her face and legs. He would take her hair and hit her head against the wall. He locked her on the balcony for hours in the winter,” said Mr. Li, speaking by telephone from Chongqing in southwestern China. The abuse went on for more than a year.
Today, Mr. Tan is dead, beaten to death by Ms. Li with the barrel of his air gun during an argument in November 2010, and Mr. Li is trying to save his sister’s life as she sits in a jail in Sichuan Province awaiting execution for murder. The case has caused an outcry among Chinese legal experts and feminists, who say it underscores the severe sentences often imposed on women who fight back, injuring or killing abusive husbands.
“Li Yan’s case tells people that extreme tragedy will happen if an abused woman cannot get effective help from the neighborhood committee, the women’s federation, the police,” said Feng Yuan, of the Anti-Domestic Violence Network, based in Beijing.
“When power cannot deliver justice, abused women will find their own way of achieving justice, sadly and wrongly,” Ms. Feng said.
Chinese law requires that a history of domestic abuse be considered in such cases. Ms. Li’s was especially gruesome: After killing her husband (which she confessed to early, asking a neighbor to call the police), she cut him up and boiled some of the parts. If that is hard to excuse, consider this, said Ms. Feng: She wasn’t in her right mind.
“There’s something called abused women’s syndrome, and she had it. A woman like that may lose her reason and lose control,” said Ms. Feng, one of hundreds of people petitioning the courts to retry Ms. Li, this time taking the abuse into proper consideration. This was not done the first time, making Ms. Li’s case a miscarriage of justice, they say.
Others who have joined the appeal include lawyers, deputies to the National People’s Congress and Amnesty International, which last week issued an urgent action call for the Chinese authorities not to execute Ms. Li. The sentence could be carried out any day now, activists say, probably before the Lunar New Year’s Eve on Feb. 9.
Women’s jails are filled with women who have injured or killed abusive husbands, according to the Anti-Domestic Violence Network, citing studies by local women’s federations and scholars. They account for 60 percent of inmates in one jail in Anshan, in Liaoning Province, and 80 percent of women serving heavy sentences in a jail in Fuzhou, in Fujian Province.
In a study by Xing Hongmei of China Women’s University, of 121 female inmates in a Sichuan jail who were serving time for attacking or killing abusive partners, 71 were originally sentenced to life in prison or to death (sometimes commuted, delayed or overturned on appeal), and 28 more were sentenced to at least 10 years. This means more than 80 percent received the heaviest possible sentences for murder or bodily harm, the study said.
For months before she killed Mr. Tan, Ms. Li sought help from the authorities in Anyue County, in Sichuan Province, where they lived, her brother said.
“She telephoned the police in, I think, May 2010, after a beating, but they said it was an affair between married people and hung up,” he said.
She went to her neighborhood committee. “They told her to go to the women’s association. The women’s association told her to go to the police. The police told her to go to the neighborhood committee,” and so it continued, he said. “She was sent from place to place and didn’t know what to do.”
Officials at the local justice department whom she asked about divorce told her that unless Mr. Tan agreed, she could be left destitute. She was better off tolerating the abuse, they advised.
There was some documentation of the abuse, including police photographs of injuries and a medical report after hospital treatment, said Mr. Li. But both the Sichuan court that sentenced her and the Supreme Court in Beijing, which reviews all death sentences — Mr. Li and activists say it upheld his sister’s sentence last week — failed to take this into account when sentencing her, Mr. Li said.
“We all hoped the court would recognize the torture she’d suffered in those years,” he said. “But it didn’t.”
“I know what my sister did was wrong, but since this happened, I have studied many cases of domestic abuse, and I know her situation is not uncommon,” he said.
He has not yet been able to tell their mother, or Ms. Li’s 18-year-old daughter from a previous marriage, that Ms. Li faces imminent execution.
“I think my niece knows, somehow,” he said. “But my mother couldn’t take it.”
Their father, who died last year, had worked in the same silk factory as Ms. Li and Mr. Tan, and had disliked the man from the start, Mr. Li said.
“He was so depressed at her situation,” he said. “I think he died of grief.”
