Lawyer in student poison case hands in 7 petitions

The new lawyer for Lin Senhao, a former university student who was convicted of killing his roommate with poison, handed seven petitions to the nation's highest court on Thursday after the court started reviewing his death sentence.

The petitions included requests for holding public hearings during the death sentence review, transferring Lin to a detention center out of Shanghai, and reinvestigating the cause of death.

Lin, 29, a former medical student at Fudan University in Shanghai, was sentenced to death in February 2014 for the murder of his roommate and classmate Huang Yang, who died of liver, kidney and lung failure more than two weeks after falling ill.

In December, the second trial of the case upheld the death sentence against Lin and the Supreme People's Court started to review the death penalty in May.

In the petitions, Xie Tongxiang, Lin's new lawyer, cited some liver disease and legal medical experts and said that Huang died of acute liver disease, rather than poisoning.

Xie said the Supreme Court had accepted his petition letters. "It will take them some time to review the letters in the following several days," he said.

(China Daily 06/26/2015 page4)