Chinese national found guilty of murdering Queens lawyer
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Jim Li, a Queens attorney and pro-democracy advocate who was murdered in 2022. Last week, a jury found 27-year-old Xiaoning Zhang guilty of his murder. File photo via Jim Li and Associates
By Noah Powelson
A Chinese national was found guilty last week of murdering her former lawyer two years ago inside his Queens office.
A jury last week found 27-year-old Xiaoning Zhang guilty of the murder of Jim Li, a well-known Flushing immigration lawyer who fled China after being imprisoned for his participation in the Tiananmen Square protests. Zhang’s attorneys argued that her untreated schizophrenia caused her to lose control in March 2022 after Li had dropped her as a client, but the jury did not agree.
“A jury weighed the trial evidence, and after careful consideration, found this defendant guilty of this senseless murder,” Queens District Attorney Melinda Katz said following Zhang’s conviction. “We extend our condolences to Mr. Li’s many family members and friends, both in the legal community and around the world.”
Jurists sat through a nearly two-week long trial that included Zhang yelling at her own attorney, frequent reprimands against the defense from Queens Supreme Court Justice Kenneth Holder and Zhang claiming that she had a stalker, and that they were harassing her in the courtroom.
The jury also saw hours of police testimony, video surveillance, eyewitness accounts and psychiatric evaluations of Zhang to determine whether or not her mental illness led her to take Li’s life.
The attorneys’ arguments focused less on whether Zhang had committed the murder or not – she testified to stabbing Li herself – but whether Zhang was in her right mind and in control of her actions during the killing. Doctors who diagnosed Zhang with schizophrenic disorder took the stand, and testified that she experienced frequent paranoid delusions of persecution.
Presenting dueling narratives, both the prosecution and defense scraped together each piece of testimony or evidence they could to tell the story of a vindictive manipulative murderer, or a mental health victim lost in her own psychosis.
Zhang, who entered the U.S. on a student visa, enlisted Li’s help to work on her asylum application pro bono in 2022.
She told Li that before coming to the country, she was interned at a mental facility in China and raped by Beijing police, which was the basis for her application. Others who worked at Li’s law office also said Zhang suffered from depression and other mental health issues.
The trial focused in particular on the events of March 11, 2022, three days before Li’s death.
Zhang had approached Li at his office that day with a request; she wanted a picture of herself at a pro-democracy protest removed from the internet. She claimed that people were harassing her because of the photograph, and she apparently believed Li, who had been a co-founder of a pro-democracy group in Flushing, could use his connections within pro-democracy groups to remove it.
When Li said that wasn’t something he was able to do, a fight broke out. According to testimony, Zhang angrily yelled at Li for not helping her, and admitted she lied about her sexual assault in Beijing. Li told her he would no longer represent her and then Zhang attempted to choke Li, according to eyewitnesses.
It was during this fight that an eyewitness testified hearing Zhang tell Li, “I will trade my life for your life.” Zhang, who speaks limited English, testified this phrase does not have the same connotation when translated from Mandarin Chinese.
Li eventually called the police that day to remove Zhang from his office. He did not press charges, but told her to never come back. Police body cam footage from the incident played for the jury showed officers telling Zhang, “Never come back here” and her nodding affirmatively to the instructions.
Zhang returned three days later, March 14, 2022, this time with a plate of pastries, some small Chinese flags and two knives.
Apparently offering the pastries as a way to apologize, Zhang met with Li again in his office. Witnesses testified they heard screaming from Li’s office when the two were alone. They then opened the door to find Li lying on the ground and Zhang over him, both covered in blood. He was stabbed four times, once in his neck and three times in his chest.
Police bodycam footage of Zhang’s arrest on March 14 was also played for the jury. While police and EMTs worked to arrest Zhang and attempted to stabilize Li, Zhang appeared quiet and compliant in the footage. Throughout the trial, officers and detectives repeatedly testified that Zhang never resisted instructions.
Zhang, who testified on the stand against her counsel’s advice, was up front with her actions and frame of mind during her encounters with Li. She admitted to stabbing Li and that she was resentful of Li’s criticisms of the Chinese government and his activist activities.
One question she was noticeably evasive toward, however, was her motive. Whether questioned by detectives, the prosecutor or her own attorney about what drove her to repeatedly stab Li, Zhang ‘s only response was “I did not want to kill him.” When pressed further, Zhang said she could not answer.
The prosecution also called a psychiatrist who diagnosed Zhang, Dr. Lawrence Siegel, to testify that while Zhang suffered from delusions, that alone did not mean she wasn’t in control of her actions. Zhang had a history of violent escalations in response to resistance, Siegel testified, and Zhang’s behavior when she killed Li was not necessarily out of line with past patterns of behavior.
All of these facts, the prosecution argued, showed that despite whatever mental health issues Zhang possesses, she targeted and planned Li’s murder. The defendant was an admitted liar, prosecutors said, and questioned if she had political motivations for the killing.
Zhang’s defense team reaffirmed their argument that she had been experiencing severely untreated schizophrenia for years, and sought to get Zhang’s charge downgraded to manslaughter. Zhang had displayed obsessive delusional behavior months before the murder, her attorneys said. Citing incidents when Zhang would email and call other people dozens of times a day because she was afraid she was being targeted by the Chinese government, the defense argued Zhang had trouble telling reality apart from her paranoid delusions.
The delusions, Zhang’s defense team argued, spiraled after Li stopped representing her. She was afraid of being deported, imprisoned in China and being sexually assaulted. They argued that when Zhang returned to Li’s office with pastries in hand, it began as a genuine attempt to apologize, but she became terrified Li was going to call the authorities on her.
Citing how Zhang can’t seem to remember why or when she killed Li, the defense argued she suffered a “profound loss of self-control” in that moment.
It was a narrative the jury ultimately did not agree with. After one day of deliberation, they found Zhang guilty on all counts.
Zhang’s defense team declined to comment on the conviction.
Holder scheduled Zhang’s sentencing for Oct. 2, 2024. She faces up to 25-years-to-life in prison.
