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The special team of prosecutors accused her of a multitude of crimes. Among other offenses, they charged, she had slandered Vice Chairman Deng, incited Red Guards to persecute her enemies in the Cultural Revolution and ordered bands of hired thugs to ransack the homes of former colleagues in the Shanghai film world, presumably to find and destroy materials about her life during the 1930s.
In a final presentation of evidence, the prosecutors flashed grisly pictures of the bruised corpse of former Coal Mining Minister Zhang Linzhi on a large screen in the courtroom and called two witnesses to testify that Jiang Qing had ordered Red Guards to deal with him as a counterrevolutionary. Then, in the "debate" portion of the trial, which allows a modicum of defense, Prosecutor Jiang Wen demanded that Mme. Mao be punished in accordance with Article 103 of China's criminal code. It allows the death penalty in cases where "serious harm" has been done to the state.
Speaking for herself (she had refused an attorney), Jiang Qing gave a long and rambling two-hour defense of the Cultural Revolution, only brief portions of which were shown a week later on Chinese TV. In it she declared that she had only carried out the decisions of Chairman Mao, Premier Chou En-lai and the party Central Committee. Jiang even drew laughs from many of the 600 courtroom spectators when, establishing her revolutionary credentials, she gave an account of her closeness to Mao. "During the war, it was I, the only woman comrade, who followed and accompanied Chairman Mao to the front," she declared. Looking at the panel of judges in front of her, she asked derisively, "At that time, where were all of you hiding?"
After a five-day recess, Prosecutor Jiang Wen condemned Mme. Mao's defense as "a vicious slander and calumny of Chairman Mao Tse-tung." Significantly, the prosecutor did acknowledge that all people in China "are very clear that Chairman Mao was responsible for their plight during the Cultural Revolution"—the sole official recognition of Mao's mistakes made in the trial. But the prosecutor hastily added that Mao could not have ordered his wife to commit such crimes as the attacks on high state and party officials.
Given a final chance to speak, Jiang Qing sarcastically noted, "You are pushing the blame on me as though I were some kind of devil with three heads and six arms who can do anything she wants." Then, just before the courtroom drama concluded with her forcible eviction, she once again declared her willingness to die for her cause. "I only wish," she said, "that I had several heads for you to chop off."