‘Give my daughter back’: parents of vanished Chinese scholar Zhang Yingying at courthouse as alleged killer Brendt Christensen’s trial begins
- Jury selection commenced on Monday in case that could lead to death penalty for the former University of Illinois student
- Christensen is accused of kidnapping, torturing and murdering Zhang in 2017
A federal judge began vetting would-be jurors on Monday in the death-penalty trial of a former University of Illinois physics student charged with kidnapping, torturing and killing a visiting Chinese scholar.
Brendt Christensen, 29, looked on in a dress shirt from a defence table as the judge put initial questions to jurors. If a jury ends up convicting him for killing 26-year-old Zhang Yingying – who aspired to become a professor to help out her working-class family in China – the trial would then enter a death-penalty phase.
When Judge James Shadid asked one potential juror Monday why she was against executions, she replied: “God doesn’t want us to take revenge,” Champaign’s News-Gazette reported.
Those who categorically oppose capital punishment or who believe it should be imposed on someone convicted of killing without expectation cannot serve as jurors in federal death-penalty cases. They will be dismissed.
Zhang’s parents were among those at the central Illinois courthouse in Peoria. The father was in court, while the mother was in an overflow room, the News-Gazette reported. They travelled from China last week and were initially expected to watch remotely from a closed-circuit video at a courthouse near the university’s Champaign campus.