Turning the tables!

Not guilty... Xu De was going to argue a Not-Guilty Defense.

Could he pull it off?

That remained to be seen, but... how could you know without trying!?

Xu De never believed in fate. He believed only in himself. As long as he tried, there was a chance, and there was hope!

An ongoing abduction offense + Legitimate Self-Defense + Voluntary Surrender + insufficient conclusive evidence...

Several unconventional angles were enough to crack open a sliver of hope in this bleak case!

"No one personally witnessed Wang Qiang deliberately killing Li Erniu..."

In the gallery.

Zhang Xia repeated Xu De's words inwardly, understanding more with every passing moment.

Exactly.

The scene had been utter chaos. Even armed police had failed to restore order, and none of the seven officers had seen Wang Qiang kill anyone before the chaos ended...

Then, with Wang Qiang's awareness impaired and a crowd pressing around him...

Anyone at the scene could have used Wang Qiang to commit murder!

What? You said only Wang Qiang's fingerprints were on the weapon?

In fact, under those circumstances, you wouldn't have needed to hold the knife yourself!

Put it this way.

You'd arm-wrestled someone before, struggled against their strength, right?

And if, while you were locked in that struggle... someone suddenly poked the back of your hand with one finger... what would happen?

The stalemate would break. That tiny extra force would make you slam your opponent's arm down without being able to stop yourself!!!

The struggle over the knife between the victim and the defendant worked the same way.

Once they understood that, everyone realized something even more frightening, because of the angle Xu De had raised...

"If that possibility holds up, there's no way to resolve this!"

"The only way to prove it would be to investigate the eyewitnesses."

"But every single person at the scene is a murder suspect. In other words, their statements can't be taken entirely at face value!"

"Yet all we have from the scene are eyewitnesses, and we can't trust their testimony..."

"..."

Murmurs immediately spread through the gallery, faces filled with disbelief.

Even at the very back of the courtroom's tiered seating.

Some camera operators who had come solely to record the proceedings couldn't help poking their heads out from behind their cameras to look toward the bench.

The defense had raised an angle that couldn't be proven, creating something like an endless loop.

Worse still...

Once those words were spoken, Xu De didn't even need to prove anything himself. The credibility of the prosecution's witness statements and eyewitness testimony had dropped by seventy percent!

Without those, what else could the prosecution use to support its case?

So...

"Could it be... the prosecution is losing the upper hand?"

Someone suddenly spoke.

Everyone's heart seemed to skip a beat. Then they immediately raised their heads and stared intently at the Trial Hearing.

Good grief, when had they ever seen anything like this... could you believe a defense attorney was actually running rings around the prosecutors!?

On the prosecution's side.

At the victim's legal representative's table.

Sun Hao... I'll never forgive you!

Chen Wei was still cursing inwardly. His hands were clenched into fists, his knuckles white, and the veins bulging on his forehead looked ready to burst.

Honestly, Chen Wei wasn't in a particularly good state of mind.

By now, he was almost certain that Sun Hao and Xu De had conspired to set him up!

On the phone, Sun Hao had explicitly said that all he needed was enough witness statements to bring the other side down. After all, the witnesses were villagers from Li Family Village, and they would instinctively protect their own.

He had believed that nonsense and prepared nothing but witness statements.

Yet he had never imagined...

That once the trial began, Xu De would casually render the only evidence he had prepared worthless with a single sentence!!!

Compared with Chen Wei's loss of composure...

The prosecutors were rattled, but nowhere near losing control.

Beside him.

"This... this... how could anyone possibly produce evidence like that!"

After hearing the opposing argument, Wang Wei looked stunned. He sat in his chair for a long time, unable to think of a rebuttal.

The rookie prosecutor, Zhang Qing, sat frozen in his seat, staring blankly at Xu De with an expression of utter revelation.

Hu Guang frowned, resting his right arm on the table and rubbing between his eyebrows as he considered how to pursue the evidence.

As he thought, he glanced at the documents on the table.

After that series of arguments... everything the Procuratorate had collected was effectively useless. They would have to find something new.

"I misjudged him. This young lawyer... is a tough opponent."

Hu Guang exhaled and gave Xu De a long, searching look.

Finally, he turned his attention to the bench.

As for where the case would go...

That ultimately depended on those three up there!

Of course, those three were far from calm themselves. They were visibly unsettled.

At the bench.

"Where did the defendant find this lawyer?"

Sun Dong finally couldn't hold back. His brows drew tightly together as he asked urgently:

"Such an unconventional angle... and more than one, at that. How could Wang Qiang possibly get someone like him!?"

To be fair, Sun Dong had served as a judge in Greenwood City for nearly ten years.

Yet he had never heard of a lawyer like this in Greenwood City!

Never mind anything else. If the defendant had been wealthy... that performance at the Trial Hearing alone would have been worth at least a million!

But Wang Qiang?

A man who had spent ten years searching for his family, who begrudged even the cost of steamed buns and pickled vegetables, someone at the very bottom of society—where would he get the money to hire a lawyer like this?

"Stop asking. He's legal aid."

Judge Liu Jianguo felt a headache coming on.

"Legal aid..." Sun Dong's temples throbbed, and he reached up to rub them.

Wasn't legal aid supposed to be a bunch of lawyers going through the motions, shirking their duties without a shred of professional ethics? How had a heavyweight like this slipped in...

"Let's focus on how to handle the case first." Liu Jianguo shook his head and steered the conversation back on track.

"The lawyer's angle is tricky. What he said... must be investigated and verified. Otherwise, even if we conclude the case, the appellate court will send it back for retrial."

Unfortunately.

A serious topic always brought silence. None of the three could say a word.

This was a rare sight.

Why?

Because the courts had an unwritten rule for criminal cases.

"You make your arguments; I make my ruling!"

Often, no matter how hard a defense attorney tried, they couldn't shake a judge's resolve. Sometimes the judge had already decided on the sentence before the hearing began, so proceedings ran smoothly, without any silence.

But... that only held when the defense attorney wasn't formidable enough.

If anything they said could spark a dispute on appeal, the judges had to take it seriously!

Could Xu De's words do that?

Absolutely. If they hastily concluded the first trial, taking those arguments to the appeal would be like detonating a nuclear bomb in a crowd...

So...

They had to handle this case with the utmost caution.

After a long while, Zhang Bingxin spoke.

"Does the defense have anything further to add?"

His brows were tightly furrowed, his fingers interlaced. It was a little gesture he made when he was serious.

At the defense table.

Xu De sat in his chair and shook his head slightly. "Presiding Judge, we have finished presenting our arguments and have nothing further to add."

Zhang Bingxin turned to the prosecution.

"Does the prosecution or the victim's legal representative have any further objections to the defense's arguments?"

The prosecutors remained silent for a moment before Hu Guang finally spoke:

"We... reserve our position."

Despite his immense frustration, Chen Wei knew that after his disastrous performance at the Trial Hearing, digging in any further would only drag the case into an abyss.

He took a deep breath and forcibly suppressed his anger.

"We reserve our position."

"Very well."

Zhang Bingxin nodded.

In truth, the court had originally planned to conclude the Wang Qiang Case at the first hearing, provided nothing unexpected happened.

After all, the facts had seemed so straightforward.

But something unexpected had happened...

One man had argued the entire prosecution into silence!

So...

Bang!

Dressed in his judicial robe, Presiding Judge Zhang Bingxin raised the Gavel high and brought it down. The sharp sound echoed through the enclosed courtroom.

The next second.

Zhang Bingxin's voice rang in their ears.

"As key facts in this case remain disputed and require further verification, I hereby declare..."

"The court is adjourned!"

Ad... adjourned?

Instead of Wang Qiang being crushed by the prosecution's overwhelming advantage, the court had been forced to adjourn?

In other words... the defense attorney had held his ground, weathered multiple rounds of relentless attacks alone, and even turned the tables!

In an instant.

All four hundred-plus people in the gallery jolted to attention.

At the same time.

At the bench.

Utterly exhausted, Presiding Judge Zhang Bingxin glanced at Xu De with a complicated look in his eyes, then shook his head and stood, his judicial robe rising with him.

"The dates for the resumed hearing and the verdict will be announced separately."