Jury selection begins in case of murdered Queens lawyer

Jim Li, a Queens attorney and pro-democracy advocate who was murdered in 2022. The trial for the woman accused of killing him is expected begin in the coming days. File photo via Jim Li and Associates

By Noah Powelson

Jury selection began this week in the trial of a woman accused of killing a Queens immigration lawyer and pro-democracy advocate whose death shook the borough’s legal community.

Prosecutors with the Queens district attorney’s office and attorneys for Xiaoning Zhang began selecting the jurors who would decide Zhang’s fate on Wednesday.

Zhang’s trial before Queens Supreme Court, Criminal Term Acting Administrative Judge Kenneth Holder is expected to begin in the coming days.

Zhang, 27, allegedly killed attorney Jim Li in his Flushing law office in March 2022.

According to prosecutors, Zhang, a former pro bono client of Li's, became enraged once the attorney stopped working on her case. That’s when she allegedly returned to his office the following week with a number of knives and repeatedly stabbed Li once they were alone.

According to reporting by the New York Times, lawyers and friends of Li who witnessed the attack said Zhang was emotionally disturbed and that she had physically attacked the 66-year-old attorney a week before his death.

Zhang, a Chinese national, was reportedly in the U.S. on an F-1 student visa preparing to go to school in California. In 2022, the Daily News reported that Zhang sought out Li seeking legal help to apply for asylum.

For whatever reason, Li, a well-known immigration lawyer in Queens, refused the case.

Li, born Li Jinjin, opened his law practice in New York in 1998 shortly after arriving in the U.S. as an asylum seeker. The attorney had been jailed in China for several years for participating in the Tiananmen Square pro-democracy protests in 1989.

Once he began his practice in Queens, Li primarily focused on immigration law, serving a number of Chinese immigrants in their efforts to live in the U.S., many of whom came over to the country as students.

Outside of his law practice, Li continued the pro-democracy advocacy he did in China, in his new home.

Li was a co-founding member and the second chairman of the Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang Memorial Foundation in Flushing.

The Memorial Foundation is a nonprofit organization named after former Chinese Communist Party officials and reform advocates who were pushed from power. Memorial Foundation members were open critics of the Chinese government and advocated for Chinese economic reform since its founding in 2005.

The foundation took a major hit in 2022, and not only because of the death of one of its co-founders.

Shortly after Li’s death, another one of the group’s founders, Shujun Wang, was arrested on charges that he spied for the Chinese government.

Wang, a Chinese professor, was convicted in August of this year for conspiracy and acting as an agent for a foreign government without notifying the attorney general, charges he vehemently denied throughout his trial.

Prosecutors alleged Wang used his position within the Memorial Foundation and influence in the Chinese community to report on dissenters of the People’s Republic of China and to its Ministry of State Security. Dissenters included Hong Kong democracy protesters, Taiwanese independence advocates, as well as Uyghur and Tibetan activists.

Li was killed just two days before Wang was arrested in 2022.

Despite the proximity of the two events, no connection between Li’s death, his work with the Memorial Foundation, or Wang’s conviction have been alleged by the Queens district attorney’s office or by federal prosecutors, who were behind Wang’s prosecution.

Li’s death disturbed members of Queens’ legal community, who had seen another one of their colleagues – 65-year-old Charles Zolot – also stabbed to death by a former client less than a year earlier.

Speaking with the Eagle in 2022 after Li’s death, then-Queens County Bar Association President Frank Bruno said that he was “stunned” to hear of Li’s killing.

“We grieve for Mr. Li and keep his family and friends in our thoughts,” Bruno said at the time. “The Queens County Bar Association stands for all lawyers in our community to provide support where needed and to take a leading role when possible.”