Prisoner Exposes the Truth about a Judge’s "Sudden Death" in a Detention Center

• Author: Pan Xiaoling

Li Chaoyang had been a judge in the Pingle County Court of the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region before he was found dead in April 2007 while being detained on suspicion of corruption at the Xing’an County Detention Center in Guilin. Although the many bruises on the corpse raised suspicions of torture, on April 29, 2007 a government investigation team announced that a “sudden death” was the cause. The team concluded that case persons handling the judge’s case and the supervisory management personnel of the detention center had not engaged in torture (to extract a confession). They had not physically abused or mistreated him, nor had his fellow cellmates tie him up and beat him.

On May 30, the Guilin Intermediate Court sentenced Li’s 63-year old cellmate, Huang Yuxin, to immediate execution. Huang then told the court that Li had died from abuse at the hands of the detention center police and other inmates and from being hanged upside down from the prison window. According to Huang, because Li had been...