A Melbourne man has failed in his latest bid to clear his name after he was jailed for hiring a hitman to kill his wife.
For more than two decades, Zhanyu Zhong, 67, has launched successive legal bids to overturn his conviction for incitement to murder his estranged wife Rong Qua Maio in 2000.
The pair had met in China in 1987 through an advertisement in a woman’s magazine before moving to Australia in the ’90s.
His 2001 trial was told Zhong’s gambling problems soon strained the relationship and they stopped living together around 1996.
Finding Zhong guilty of the plot, the jury accepted he had hired an undercover police operative, going by the alias Mark James, to murder Ms Maio.
In a series of secretly recorded meetings, Zhong described wanting Ms Maio killed because he felt he had “no choice”.
He was jailed in 2001, serving 3½ years, before he was released on parole in early 2004.
Questions were raised through the trial as to whether Zhong truly wanted his wife dead and whether his inability to raise the price nominated would ever have resulted in the contracted hit.
Since his release, Zhong has repeatedly attempted to clear his name “by every channel available at law”, ultimately failing in every bid.
His efforts began soon after his release with an application filed to the Court of Appeal and progressed over the decades to petitioning each successive attorney-general for mercy.
He returned on Wednesday before the Victorian Supreme Court, where Justice Timothy Ginnane dismissed Zhong’s application for a judicial review into Attorney-General Jaclyn Symes’ decision to reject his latest petition.
Zhong had asked Ms Symes to refer the case to the Court of Appeal.
Justice Ginnane said he had reviewed Zhong’s arguments and “I don’t agree with them”.
Zhong, who represented himself, countered that the state of Victoria had “totally disregarded” his human rights, saying there were legal questions with his trial left unanswered.
Outside court, Zhong maintained he did not want to kill Ms Maio and accused the undercover police officer of pressuring and intimidating him into the plot.
Despite numerous failed petitions and legal challenges, he vowed to continue.
“I just want answers and no one will give them to me,” he said.
“On that day I wanted to leave the bloody undercover and I wanted to report it … the undercover threatened to kill me if I did so.”