Media Coverage of Lucy Lu

Lucy Lu was able to leave the church basement in Kingston, where she has lived in sanctuary for over 16 months! The new Immigration Minister granted her a 3 year stay one day after the local immigration office served notice of rejected of her application to remain in Canada.

Further details will be posted in the coming days.

Lucy and her husband Daryll, are deeply appreciative to the members of DAWN Ontario for your diligent support over the last year.

Thank You for making a difference!

Page Contents

Lu discusses arrest, trial, life in Canada   
By Annette Phillips, The Kingston Whig Standard, March 17, 2001

Court transcripts show police had no proof [Lucy Lu] killed her husband
By Annette Phillips, The Kingston Whig Standard, March 10, 2001

Lu's support crosses political lines
By Annette Phillips, The Kingston Whig Standard, May 12, 2001

Lu discusses arrest, trial, life in Canada

Lucy and a growing number of supporters strongly deny she killed her husband

By Annette Phillips
Whig Standard Staff Writer
March 17, 2001

Lucy Lu's claims of innocence in the 1985 bludgeoning death of her husband may fall on deaf ears among Canadian Immigration officials, but the throng of supporters continues to grow who say the woman evading deportation at Calvary Bible Church could never be capable of the crime.

Lu has been at the centre of a deportation controversy since November, when she refused to follow an order to leave the country.

Though she has steadfastly maintained her innocence, Lu is classed as "undesirable" by Immigration standards because she signed a plea bargain that says she attacked her husband with a meat cleaver in an argument over sex.

Police constructed a convincing theory around the 1985 death of He Zhang Zhao. Their theory had Lu ambushing her husband as he slept - fracturing his skull with a blow to the forehead and inflicting 14 wounds - before carting his limp body through the house and out to the snow-covered back yard of their Chinatown house where he eventually died of exposure.

Police had nothing more than circumstantial evidence on which to send Lu to trial, but with little command of the English language, no friends or family in this country and no real understanding of what she was doing, Lu pleaded guilty to manslaughter. In doing so, she left herself open to deportation.

In a candid interview this week, Lu spoke for the first time with The Whig-Standard about the circumstances surrounding the death of Zhao.

From the beginning, Lu's life has had its share of tragedy. When Lu was 12, she said, her father and uncle were jailed over allegations the uncle was involved in anti-communist activities in China.

Her father was tortured and subjected to slave labour until he admitted publicly, that he was guilty of grievous wrongs against the state.

From being class monitor - a position that guaranteed respect, friendship and praise - Lu became an outcast. She and the rest of her family bore the labels of traitor and criminal.

Less than a year after coming to Canada, Lu says she found herself in a situation similar to that of her father. She says after two mistrials, she finally pleaded guilty in the hope that by doing prison time, she could get on with her life.

In the late afternoon of March 13, 1985, Lu arrived home from her job at a sewing machine factory to find her dilapidated Chinatown apartment building swarming with police and strangers. "I was unsure whether to go in or not," Lu says, "I remember I went upstairs and saw a lot of people. I have no idea who they are."

Her father-in-law, who lived in the couple's two-room apartment, was home when the body was found. The two of them were taken to the police station, where officers made Lu take off her jacket. "They looked at my arms and looked at my fingernails very closely for a long time." she says.

The horror of the ordeal was that in their unfamiliarity with her culture, police forced her to take off her jacket. In Chinese custom, she said, taking off one's jacket is comparable to removing all one's clothing. "It was so embarrassing," she said. "In China you do not take off your clothes in front of people. Here, I was supposed to do it in front of men."

It was almost a month later when, after tearing up the floorboards in the bedroom she shared with Zhao, police found blood stains and laid charges of murder.

Lu was arrested on her way home from work and she was surprised to find, through a Chinese-speaking police officer, that police had accused her of trying to evade arrest.

"[Police] were waiting for me outside the factory after work. They said they lost me. I have no idea they were out there," she said. Lu ran a couple of errands, walked to the bus stop and headed home. She was arrested a few blocks from the apartment.

At the police station, Lu was questioned without a lawyer. A Chinese-speaking police officer acted as interpreter. She was charged and moved to a provincial detention centre, armed with only a Chinese-English dictionary.

Using the dictionary, fellow inmates helped Lu understand she must contact a lawyer. Then they helped her make the call.

"I remember [police] sent a lady police officer dressed as an inmate into my cell," Lu said. "The people in the jail pulled me away from her and used the dictionary to point to the word 'police'."

The undercover officer tried to get a confession from her. Lu says, "I didn't talk to her at all. She left after one night and one day."

Lu did get a lawyer - the first in a succession of eight who would defend her at three separate trials. She says they made little effort to ensure that she fully understood what was going on around her.

Considering she was charged with first-degree murder, Lu thought it odd that a judge would allow her to walk out the courtroom on her own recognizance just two weeks after she was arrested.

Bail was set at $500. Though Lu didn't have the money to post the bond, the judge freed her on nothing more than a promise to appear in court.

When she was released from custody, Lu found her in-laws preparing to move to Hamilton to be near their daughter. Despite accusations that she brutally murdered their son, the Zhao family helped Lu find a new apartment and move her belongings.

Police and prosecutors remained firmly attached to their theory of Zhao's death: Lu attacked him with a meat cleaver while he slept; his body lay on the floor next to their bed for several hours; she carried him to the snowbank in the back yard of 125 Westminster, where he died.

A mop with bloodstains on it was found in the building. A drop of blood was found on the apartment building stairwell. A smudge of blood was found on the wall beside the stairs. A blood stain was found on a blanket in the basement. A meat cleaver was discovered in the shared kitchen down the hall.

Arguments between the couple had escalated in the months before Zhao's death, mostly over her unwillingness to have sex, police said. They said she feared her immigration status would be in jeopardy if she divorced Zhao. Lu did seek information on divorce and she allegedly told a co-worker she wished her husband was dead.

Zhao took to disappearing for days and weeks at a time. On the evening of March 5, 1985, more than a week before his body was found in the back yard, Zhao left the apartment for the last time. Lu says she never say him again.

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After two trials and a suicide attempt, Lu's eighth court-appointed lawyer struck a guilty plea, marrying her to a set of circumstances that led straight to mandatory deportation.

According to transcripts of Lu's first and third trials, there were clues that pointed to someone else as the culprit.

There was a letter, for example, in the dead man's pocket that warned him to repay a debt or suffer an undetermined consequence. There was a letter sent to Lu's lawyer, protesting her innocence, which police accused Lu of writing herself.

The note and Zhao's behaviour suggested, to some people, ties to organized crime.

Bill Lai, one of Lu's interpreters and a former police officer, is among those who believe Zhao was a gambler involved in organized crime. Lai told The Whig-Standard that the circumstances suggest more than one person was involved in the murder and it is possible that witnesses to the crime were silenced with a warning.

Lu says she knows nothing about where her husband went or what he did during his long absences from home, their marriage was not nearly as bad as it was portrayed by police and prosecutors.

For starters, she says Zhao never pressured her for sex. The two had a mutual understanding that they would wait two years before having children, she says.

Zhao argued constantly with his father. Because Lu is Cantonese, she did not understand their Mandarin dialogue. "They always argue a lot, but they always use their own language, their own dialect, so I have no idea what they are saying," Lu says.

She knows she was a disappointment as a daughter-in-law, to the extent that her husband's family talked of sending her back to China, yet Lu is empathetic. "My husband was the youngest and I think parents, well, they always want to protect their kids."

She did go to a local agency seeking information on divorce. Contrary to what police said, Lu says she never considered divorce a threat to her immigration status.

"I just wanted to find out the information, so I spoke to somebody at the agency," she said, adding that a co-worker translated for her. "I was never told I would be deported."

Lu told a friend she wished her husband was dead. "I don't know how to explain to you the dialect differences," she says today. "I speak Cantonese; my co-worker speaks Mandarin. I say "I wish he wasn't here," she takes it to mean something else.

"People always say in Canada, you can say whatever you wish," Lu remarks, wryly. "If you don't have any trouble, you can say whatever you wish, but if you have trouble, you be very careful what you say."

Lu says she knows no more about how Zhao died than did her father-in-law, who would have been in the next room when her husband was killed.

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Not a single person in the three-storey walkup heard or saw a thing out of the ordinary around the time of Zhao's death.

To fit the police theory, Lu would have had to silently bludgeon her husband to unconsciousness; undress and reclothe the body in underclothes, pajamas and outdoor clothes; then move the body, at least 18 kilograms heavier than her own, down two steep flights of stairs and into the backyard. After that, she would have scrubbed the floor. All without disturbing the neighbours.

The theory is that Lu managed to do this without leaving any discernable footprints in the snow and without suffering a single scratch to herself; leaving no sign of struggle at the scene or on her husband's body - and without breaking a single one of her talon-like fingernails.

"When they were examining my fingernails I couldn't figure out why and then I saw how long they were," she said. "None of them were broken. Not even a chip."

Lu says she never fully understood the legal process in which she was involved. She had 10 minutes with an interpreter before the start of her third trial to hear and consider the plea bargain.

Lu says she did not know her immigration status would be revoked, although it is contained in a statement of fact agreed to by her lawyer.

"At that time, I knew I was going to jail. My mind was not [on my immigration status]. I was scared and I knew I was going to jail.

"I just signed the paper."

Lu didn't know, until she was told by a reporter, that pathologists couldn't confirm that the meat cleaver was the murder weapon.

"In the trial, I had a translator, but you can't translate every word. There isn't time."

There was also a suicide attempt.

Prior to her first trial, Lu drank a bottle of windshield washer fluid at the graveside of her dead husband. Since it had a picture of a skull and crossbones on it, she believed it to be poison.

With murder charges pending, Lu had lost face in the Chinese community and felt she could not longer go on.

Before drinking the windshield washer fluid, she wrote a cheque for $3,000 to her social worker, so the government would not be burdened with the cost of her burial.

It's an indication of Lu's character that convinces those who know her - among them a police officer, the members of her church, her husband, her employer, a parole officer, a psychiatrist and the head of the Elizabeth Fry Society - of her innocence.

Trish Crawford is executive director of the Elizabeth Fry Society and has worked with offenders for 15 years. She met Lu when she was serving time at Prison for Women and continued to work with her after her release.

"This is not just about a woman who made Canada her home. This is a person about whom there are serious questions whether she ever committed a crime," Crawford said.

From the start, Crawford was not convinced of Lu's guilt. "Our reviews.... have always indicated that the evidence around this conviction was largely circumstantial," Crawford said.

"In the years we were supporting her, not only was Lucy a model citizen, but she was doing everything she could to improve her own situation.

"She never presented any security concerns and she never exhibited any attitude or behaviour that would suggest she was capable of killing someone."

Lu was paroled at the earliest possible date, she was never involved in subsequent criminal activity and she continued to rent an apartment from Elizabeth Fry until she was married last October.

Psychiatrist J.A. Chandu-Lall saw Lu in 1993, at the time of her first deportation appeal. "I have considerable doubt as to her ever having murdered or being an accomplice to her husband's death," wrote Chandu-Lall.

Brian Begbie, a Kingston Police officer and a member of the congregation of Calvary Bible Church, expressed a similar position. "The thought of Lucy possibly having been involved in the incident for which she was convicted just doesn't seem to fit her character," Begbie wrote.

For some supporters, Lu's guilt or innocence is irrelevant, in view of the possibility that she could be retried and executed for the crime if she is deported to China.

Thursday, the Canadian Union of Public Employees joined the Canadian Auto Workers and the Union of National Defence Employees in condemning Lu's deportation.

Whether she is guilty as charged is beside the point. Ms. Lu has already served time for manslaughter," said Dave Cornwall, local CUPE president.

"It's just plain wrong for our Canadian government to send this woman back to a country where we know she will most certainly be executed."

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Canadians aren't the only ones offended by Lu's deportation.

'This is not just about a woman who made Canada her home. This is a person about whom there are serious questions whether she ever committed a crime'

"I am deeply shocked and saddened at the decision in Lucy Lu's case, which appears to me to be a complete derogation from all of Canada's commitments to upholding human rights," wrote Sharon Dillon, an immigration lawyer in Ireland, in a letter to the prime minister last week.

Dillon says Canada is regarded as the standard-bearer on immigration and human rights issues worldwide and is highly thought of for its protection of immigrants.

Dillon points to the Prime Minister's own call for improved human rights policies during his February trip to China.

"I can only view such a call for action as hypocritical and insincere when Lucy Lu remains under threat of deportation," Dillon said.

Lu scoffs at the suggestion she married Darryl Gellner to gain landed-immigrant status. She proudly displays her wedding album, one of her special treasures.

Lu and Gellner were married less than a month when Immigration Canada ordered her out of the country, but the relationship dates back to December 1997.

He took her to the Festival of Trees on their first date.

After a few months, the confirmed bachelor started to mention marriage.

"At first, I thought he was joking," she says. "After a few months, I knew he already had the ring because one time he took me to the store and asked the lady to measure my finger."

A converted nursery in Calvary Bible Church may not be an ideal home, but the congregation has gone to great lengths to make it as cosy as possible. The current project is a hand-made quilt for Lu's bed.

Meanwhile, Gellner and Lu's circle of friends - spearheaded by her employer, shoe store owner Bob Hawkins - lobby on Lu's behalf, sending letters and information packages to church groups, unions and media around the world.

Cornwall says he will ask locals across the province to show their support and contribute to her legal costs.

"As a union, we don't condone this kind of stuff," Cornwall said.

Legal appeals are in the works, but previous pleas to Immigration and the courts have been unsuccessful and Lu remains very much afraid that one day, Immigration will get tired of waiting for her to come out of the church and take steps to remove her with force.

"I really don't know what's going to happen," she says. "All I know is that I can only live one day at a time and that's what I'm trying to do."

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Court transcripts show police had no proof [Lucy Lu]
killed her husband

By Annette Phillips
Whig Standard Staff Writer
March 10, 2001

The clock is ticking for Lucy Lu. Monday morning, she must either come out of Calvary Bible Church for the first time since she ducked a deportation order last November -- or she will lose the right and the means to gain legal status in Canada.

If she comes out of the church, she will almost certainly be arrested. She could be on a flight to China by nightfall, regardless of other possible appeals.

She's trapped, she's scared and she has no intention of leaving the sanctuary that has so far kept police and Immigration from forcibly removing her.

The Immigration Appeal Board has rejected four separate appeals since the initial deportation order was issued in 1991.

Because she admitted to committing a crime, she is ineligible for admission to Canada.

If Immigration officials were inclined to make an exception, the heinous nature of the crime to which Lu confessed has precluded empathy for the dire straits she is now in.

Tuesday, March 13, marks 16 years since death of 27-year-old He Zhang Zhao. According to Crown prosecutors, the Chinese immigrant was hacked to unconsciousness with a meat cleaver in the bedroom of his Chinatown apartment in Toronto and carried to the back yard of the dingy three-storey walkup, where he died, after several hours, in the snow.

The killer, they believe, was Lucy Lu, aka Mrs. Kwai Kwan Zhao, aka Mrs. Kuei Fuen Zhao, aka Lucy Lu.

Lu was tried three separate times on charges of first-degree murder. Her first trial ended in a hung jury, when jurors couldn't agree on a verdict. The second ended in a mistrial when her lawyers found a cryptic note pointing blame at someone else.

Lu negotiated a plea bargain on a lesser charge of manslaughter at the third trial.

She was handed a 10-year sentence at the Prison for Women but served less than two years of that time.

Lu claims she never killed her husband.

Is it possible?

The original record of Lu's trial is found in an incomplete set of transcripts held at Toronto's York County Courthouse, and in a copy of the plea proceeding obtained by The Whig-Standard.

A transcript of the second trial was never made, or has been lost.

With the help of Susan McNardy, manager of court reporting, and her assistant, Yvonne Dixon, The Whig-Standard gained access to the transcripts and therein found a compelling story and circumstances that detail how and why the web of evidence surrounding Zhao's death snared Lucy Lu.

What the transcripts also show is that police failed to uncover a single shred of proof that Lu was, in fact, guilty of murdering He Zhang Zhao.

Prosecutors were only guessing that the meat cleaver was indeed the murder weapon.

In one of three apartments subdividing the top floor of the seedy Zhao abode lived at various times, He Zhang Zhao, 27; his wife of eight months, Lucy Lu; Zhao's parents and his sister, Lisa.

The mail order-like marriage of Zhao and Lu appeared doomed from the start. Zhao was a deadbeat who couldn't - or wouldn't - hold a job.

He wouldn't study English enough to become fluent in the language, was criticized by his family and within weeks of the marriage, began disappearing from the home for days and weeks at a time.

The marriage was never consummated, though it appears there was to some degree a mutual understanding to wait two years before having children and a mutual ignorance of birth control measures.

In a letter to Lu on one of the occasions he left home, her husband wrote of his anguish in his broken English.

"The reasons why I left you not because I don't like you but because something else happened," Zhao wrote.

"I know the family always look down on me, never care about me, treat me like dog. I can't never get ahead."

"This time I left the family, I don't want to do it, but the family made me to do so. I think I'm a useless husband."

In time, Zhao started to pressure his wife for sex. His parents accused her of being a bad wife. They wrote a letter of complaint to her family in China, which Lu intercepted and threw out. They talked to the Chinese community about sending her back to China.

Lucy wanted a way out. She sought advice on divorce and found her citizenship would be in jeopardy if she left Zhao. She told a friend she wished her husband was dead.

To police, that spelled motive.

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Police arrived on the crime scene minutes after a neighbourhood dog found Zhao's body in a snowbank outside 125A Westminster. There was little blood, no signs of a scuffle and no apparent cause for the 27-year-old's death.

"He could quite possibly have slipped and fallen, "Sgt. Mark Thorpe told the court.

Police did notice Zhao's feet. His steel-toed work boots were loosely laced and his socks didn't match. Yet Zhao's belt - a bright yellow plastic type common at the time - was securely fastened around his waist.

Beneath Zhao's pants was a pair of blood-soaked pajamas. Under those, Zhao wore underwear with barely any blood. Bloodstains on the various pieces of clothing didn't match, meaning Zhao was dressed after he was attacked, police believed.

Zhao's pockets yielded a wallet and money, but no house key. He had disappeared from home - an occurrence that had become routine over time - more than a week before his body was found, yet police were convinced the absence of a house key meant Zhao had been inside his own home when he was killed.

Concentrating their investigation on the Zhao apartment, police found, amid the grime, an area beside the bed of Zhao and Lu that stood out for its cleanliness. The floor appeared scrubbed where the rest of the apartment was dirty.

Police pried up the floorboards and found Zhao's blood underneath. Autopsy results said Zhao lay on his back for a period of time and that his body had been moved from the murder scene and dumped in the snowbank.

From there, the trail of circumstances pointing to Lu began to grow. They found blood on a mop and a blood spot on the building's main staircase. Later they discovered a blood smudge on a downstairs wall and a bedspread in the basement also concealing a bloodstain.

Lu's marital dissatisfaction provided motive. Prosecutors developed the theory that Zhao was lying in bed, possibly asleep, when his wife, angry and panic-stricken at the thought of being sent home, picked up a meat cleaver from the kitchen, crept into the bedroom and delivered a crippling blow to her husband's forehead.

Then, they allege, she continued to hack at Zhao, turning him over and delivering additional blows to the back of his head.

Once Zhao was unconscious, prosecutors maintained that Lu removed his pajama bottoms, dressed him in his underwear, put the pajamas back on and pulled on his pants, boots and a coat.

She then carried or dragged Zhao from the third-floor apartment, through the hallways, down two steep flights of stairs and out into the backyard, where she left him in the snow.

Evidence further pointed toward Lu because the murder scene was scrubbed and killers don't clean up after themselves, Sgt. Thorpe testified.

Pathologists were not as certain about the meaning of the evidence.

When Dr. John Deck started to examine the body, he found, once Zhao's head was shaved, a series of 14 abrasions on the front and back of his head.

The abrasions ranged in size from one-half inch to two inches in length and had caused a small amount of internal bleeding. What Deck also found and what he believes eventually killed Zhao - was a fractured skull caused by a significant blow to the forehead.

Pathologist Dr. John Deck guessed Zhao had lived for several hours - perhaps as long as 24 hours - after the blow was delivered before internal bleeding and brain damage caused his organs to shut down.

Deck speculated Zhao could have been saved, had he received treatment, though the extent of brain damage could not be estimated.

What Deck did not say was that a meat cleaver, picked up by police in the kitchenette of the Zhao apartment, was, in fact, the murder weapon. Nor did he state conclusively that all 14 abrasions were caused by the same instrument.

The fatal blow, he said, was as likely to have been delivered with an axe or a machete as with the meat cleaver, which had no blood or other evidence on it to identify it as the murder weapon.

"There is no identifiable characteristic of these injuries that tells me it must have been a meat cleaver that caused them," Deck said.

The pathologist was also unable to tell when Zhao had died or how long he had been lying in the snow. There was no sign of freezing on the body, though temperatures had hovered around freezing for several days.

Police spent scant time interviewing Zhao's father, with whom the son had had a tempestuous relationship at best. During the time frame police believed the murder occurred, the elder Zhao was inside the apartment.

There were other rumours about Zhao's secret life: That he was involved with organized crime through a some-time-job with a local Chinese laundry and that he was a gambler who had amassed substantial debts.

Indeed, the letter he wrote to Lu makes cryptic references to what seems to be a second "family."

"I already explained to the church whatever the family did I am not afraid of them. In Canada there is still a law. The church will help me solve the problem.

"To die is better than to live and wait and see which day accident will happen at work."

And there was a mysterious note, fashioned from a Chinese newspaper, warning Zhao to pay up or suffer the consequences. The note was found by Lu's lawyers in the pocket of the dead man's jacket almost two years after his death.

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The note caused a mistrial at Lu's second trial because police and Crown prosecutors had failed to hand it over to the defence.

But the police investigation, the crown investigation and the trials, however, continued to focus on Lu and after three years fearing she would go to jail every day, the young woman says, she pleaded guilty.

"I just wanted to get it over with," Lu said.

Many questions remain unanswered:

* How did a 98-pound woman move a 135-pound dead body from the third floor apartment to the backyard, leaving just traces of blood on a stair, and a smudge on the wall?

* With at least six families in the building and Zhao's father in an adjoining room, how could no one have seen, or heard, a thing?

* Why were alleged links to organized crime not investigated more thoroughly?

Bill Lai, a former police officer, acted as interpreter at Lu's trial.

In an interview with The Whig-Standard, he described Zhao as "mentally retarded" and said the young man "did not know how to perform as a husband."

Lai says Zhao was dim enough to have inflicted the wounds himself. Whoever found him unconscious probably dressed him hurriedly in readiness for an ambulance.

There was a 911 call placed the day prior to the discovery of Zhao's body, Lai said, but the English-speaking dispatcher didn't understand her Chinese called and an ambulance was never sent.

If Zhao was murdered, it was over a gambling debt and Lai believes more than one person was involved.

Zhao's own father suggested, in his testimony, that a brick may have been used.

Lai regrets advising Lu to take the plea bargain.

"Nobody really believes Lucy did it," Lai said. "Lucy is such a decent lady. She's no killer."

As far as Immigration officials are concerned, the unanswered questions are moot in view of Lu's plea bargain.

Letters from police officers, lawyers, parole officers and members of the public protesting Lu's innocence and begging for leniency have fallen on deaf ears.

Though they have waffled between assuring the public Lu presents no danger and calling her a dangerous criminal, Immigration continues to be steadfast in its intent to deport her.

She is now in Canada illegally. As things stand, if she doesn't come out of the church to attend a hearing in Toronto on Monday, the Immigration Appeal Board may remove Lu's power to appeal.

If that happens, she will never be legally permitted to remain in Canada.

If she is returned to China, that country's Criminal Code allows for Lu to be re-tried and possibly executed for her husband's death.

Lu is a Christian and an outspoken critic of China's human rights abuses.

Though the Supreme Court ruled recently that Canada may not deport foreigners who face torture or execution, Immigration Canada takes the position that Lu is in no danger.

The Immigration Appeal Board agrees and its order to appear, issued Wednesday, appears more concerned with Lu's defiance of a direct order than with any consequences she might suffer if she comes out of the church.

"The applicant's conduct is unacceptable because of its lack of regard for due process," writes the board. "She wishes to avail herself of due process, but only if it gives her the result she wants."

Lu says she will not come out of the church Monday morning. Her lawyer, Stephen LeDrew, will attempt to persuage the board to hear Lu's deportation appeal anyway.

"It is in the interests of justice they hear this woman's case," LeDrew said yesterday.

"The board has said it is unlikely it will hear the case. It doesn't mean it can't hear it.

"It can and it should."

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Lu's support crosses political lines

Alliance critic says Ottawa playing games with Lucy Lu's life

By Annette Phillips
Whig Standard Staff Writer
May 12, 2001

A Canadian Alliance government would grant Lucy Lu a permit to stay in Canada, since there doesn't appear to be conclusive evidence that she killed her husband 16 years ago.

"If her case doesn't put the system at risk or set a precedent, why not?" said Inky Mark, Alliance immigration critic, in an interview this week. His statements are indicative of the support Lu's case is gathering across the political spectrum.

The Alliance position is that immigrants who commit serious crimes should be deported. Lu pleaded guilty to the 1985 bludgeoning death of her first husband, though she claims she didn't do it.

"There appears to be reasonable evidence she didn't commit the crime," Mark said.

If there is no new evidence found and no other recourse, she should be allowed to remain in Canada."

Immigration is determined to deport Lu because of her guilty plea. After more than 10 years of unsuccessful appeals, Immigration officials have suggested Lu launch an appeal on humanitarian grounds. A favourable ruling might mean that the minister, Elinor Caplan, would grant the ministerial permit Lu needs to stay in Canada.

But a humanitarian appeal is costly and would keep Lu in Calvary Bible Church, where she has sought sanctuary, for at least another year. The outcome of the appeal is not guaranteed and at the end of the day, Lu would still need the minister's permit that Caplan will not grant her now, her lawyers say.

Without unequivocal evidence that Lu committed a crime, the government is wrong to make Lu suffer in the church any longer, Mark said.

"It's absolutely irrational," he said. "It's like a game they're playing with someone's life."

The minister should consider other factors, like Lu's marriage to a Canadian citizen and the community support demonstrated for her through 1,000 letters and a 6,000-name petition, Mark said.

"Surely that should carry some weight," he said.

"Maybe the community should show no confidence in the minister."

It isn't certain if, under United Nations agreements, Lu can be deported to China given that their Criminal Code allows for her to be re-tried--and possibly executed--for a crime she has already served time for, he added.

Mark is critical of the minister's refusal to respond to the wishes of the community and says Lu's only recourse is the extended humanitarian appeal.

Alliance support is not surprising, said Kingston and The Islands MPP John Gerretsen.

"I don't think it is a partisan issue," Gerretsen said this week. "It's a humanitarian issue as far as I'm concerned."

The Kingston and the Islands MPP has joined the 7,000 people--including Mark--who have called on the minister to show compassion for Lu.

"Everybody I've been in contact with speaks highly of this individual," Gerretsen said.

"From a strictly humanitarian viewpoint...whatever this woman did, she served her time and she has been a model citizen in this community."

Gerretsen says the letters and petitions "would certainly be enough to persuade an individual" of public support for Lu.

"When a minister gets 1,000 letters, they know what's going on," he said.

It appears Caplan is trying to find a solution by sending Lu through the humanitarian-appeal route, but Gerretsen doesn't condone any action that would keep Lu in the church.

"I'd like to see it stopped as quickly as possible," he said. "The quicker this comes to an end, the better. I don't think any of this is doing anybody any good."

Caplan's refusal to act on Lu's dilemma in the face of public outcry is probably because she doesn't want to set a precedent, Gerretsen said.

Mark says he doesn't think a show of compassion for Lu would threaten the immigration system. He says Caplan's refusal to grant a permit is puzzling.

"It's the riding of the [Commons] Speaker. Kingston is a stronghold of the Liberal party," Mark said. "To do this to an opposition colleague might be acceptable, but to do this to one's own colleague....is not."

Some city politicians are also looking to turn up the heat on Caplan.

Councillor Steve Garrison will ask for a council motion urging the minister to pay attention to the petitions and letters she has received.

"Council's hands are tied in that [immigration matters] are outside our jurisdiction, but I think the fact that this is a community issue supercedes the jurisdiction issue," Garrison said.

Some 2,000 Kingston residents have signed petitions in support of Lu, he said.

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