‘‘Shut up!’’ shouted Feng Wei, a judge from the Sichuan Higher People’s Court, banging his gavel. We were in a courtroom here, about 60 miles southeast of Chengdu, the provincial capital. At stake was the life of Li Yan, sentenced to death in 2011 for killing her husband during an argument.
In a surprise move this year, China’s top court, the Supreme People’s Court in Beijing, ordered a retrial. The court has been working to reduce the use of the death penalty, and it was not convinced that justice had been done in this case.
But Judge Feng’s crack of wood on wood last Friday hardly stilled the cacophony in the Ziyang courtroom.
Ms. Li said her husband, Tan Yong, was often violent toward her during a marriage that began in 2009 and ended when she hit him twice on the head with the barrel of his air rifle on Nov. 3, 2010. She then chopped up his body.
It was a case packed with difficult issues: domestic abuse, the government’s shift away from the death penalty and the social pressures to retain it.
Even getting into the court building wasn’t easy.
The Tans — a large family from nearby Anyue County where Ms. Li, a former silk factory worker, and Mr. Tan, a former driver, ran a noodle stall — wanted Ms. Li dead. ‘‘A life for a life’’ read the banners held by the relatives and supporters of the family outside the courtroom.
An attempt to interview the Tans failed. They saw a foreign reporter as a representative of unwelcome views, now apparently shared by Beijing, that might deprive them of seeing Ms. Li executed.
‘‘Write this down!’’ Mr. Tan’s brother, Tan Gang, angrily ordered. ‘‘Tell us! What is your personal opinion of the case?’’ Several of his sisters shouted insults, wagging fingers that hit my arm.
‘‘Show your papers!’’ he said. I couldn’t. The papers were with the court officials.
‘‘How would you feel if a member of your family had been killed?’’ he demanded, as others added their voices to the melee.
The siblings surrounded me, yanking my arms and my bag, pushing and pulling me back as I tried to walk to the court. I was trapped, and required rescuing by the court police. For a short time I wondered, would I be lynched in a small town in Sichuan?
‘‘You have to understand,’’ Wang Daogang, an official from Chengdu, said later. ‘‘They have lost a family member.’’
Inside the courtroom, more than a hundred blue chairs offered public seating at the back of the room, behind a low barrier. The red-and-gold seal of the Chinese state hung high on a marble wall behind the dais where the judges sat. Ms. Li, guarded by three officers, sat below them.
Originally we were to sit in the public section, but that was no longer deemed safe. Instead, a photographer and I were escorted to a glass box near the judges. A policeman sat guard outside.
Mr. Feng, the lead judge of three, here for the day from the higher court in Chengdu, which in 2012 upheld the death sentence on appeal, neatly folded his tan dress jacket on top of a small wheeled suitcase behind his chair, as if ready to leave immediately. The trial lasted nearly six hours. Sentencing would follow at an unspecified time, he said.
‘‘What we have to decide here today,’’ he said, leaning forward to speak into a microphone, ‘‘is if the victim was at fault. And if the original verdict was appropriate.’’
Periodically, the Tans howled insults at Ms. Li’s two female defense lawyers: ‘‘You should be raped 500 times!’’ No one was thrown out for contempt of court. Ms. Li’s relatives sat quietly in a far corner at the back.
Everyone in China wants a better legal system, and the government has promised to provide it. But after decades of corruption, abuse of due process and politically motivated trials, respect for the law — for all authority, in fact — runs low. Pressure from a mob can swing decisions, with the authorities fearing social stability “incidents” that will reflect badly on them with their superiors.
The next day, in Chengdu, Wan Miaoyan, one of Ms. Li’s lawyers, said, smiling wryly: ‘‘You see from this the difficulties that China faces.’’