China court grants death sentence reprieve to abuse victim

A Chinese court granted a woman who killed her husband after years of abuse a two-year death sentence reprieve, state media said Friday, a move cautiously welcomed by human rights activists.

The death sentence for Li Yan, 44, is expected to be commuted to a prison term after two years of good behavior, a shift which follows an unprecedented retrial last June that some hailed as a signal China was serious about battling domestic violence.

Li’s attorney, Wan Miaoyan, said the high court in Sichuan province in central China ordered the reprieve Friday for 44-year-old Li Yan.

"I met her yesterday, and she kept saying sorry to the family of the victim," Wan told the Associated Press. "Before the retrial began today, the family of the victim was using the most abusive words to insult her, and even threw shoes at her."

The decision in Li's case, which has been widely discussed on the Internet in China, comes as authorities have also drawn global criticism for the recent detention of five women activists who had planned to demonstrate against sexual harassment on public transport on International Women’s Day, March 8. They had officially been detained on suspicion of “picking quarrels and provoking trouble,” international advocacy group Human Rights in China reported.

The women were released on April 13, after a global outcry against their arrest.

The Ziyang City Intermediate People's Court in southwestern Sichuan province ruled on Friday that Li's actions constituted homicide but disagreed about the extent of the punishment.

"The original judgment's determination of the facts and conviction was correct and the trial's procedures were lawful, but the assessment of the punishment was inappropriate," the court said, according to Sichuan Online, a website run by the ruling Communist Party's Sichuan Daily.

The court could not be reached immediately for comment.

Li was originally sentenced to death in 2012 for killing her husband Tan Yong, who had physically, sexually and verbally abused her for more than three years, burning her with cigarettes and cutting off one of her fingers.

Li beat her husband to death with an air gun after he threatened to shoot her. She then cut up his body and boiled the body parts, media reports said.

"The reprieve for Li Yan could prove a landmark verdict for future cases where domestic violence is a mitigating factor," William Nee, China Researcher at Amnesty International, said in an emailed statement.

"Yet, the continued persecution of five young activists that campaign to prevent violence against women casts a dark shadow on this ruling," Nee said, referring to the International Women’s Day demonstrators.

In August 2014, China’s top prosecutor Cao Jianming, in an article published by Chinese business magazine Caixin, renewed calls to reform China’s legal system — arguing that defendants are often times considered guilty until proven innocent. Analysts have told Al Jazeera that recent attempts to bolster rule of law and transparency in China’s legal system would have no bearing on politically charged trials like that of the five women’s rights activists.

Al Jazeera and wire services