A high-profile case in which two men are accused of forcing a girl in Hunan province into prostitution was heard in a retrial on Friday by the provincial high people’s court.

The new trial was ordered by the Supreme People’s Court, which rejected the death penalty in the case in June.

Qin Xing and Zhou Junhui, the accused, both of Yongzhou, were sentenced to death for organizing prostitution and forcing the then-11-year-old girl to engage in sex acts, according to the first-instance verdict from the Yongzhou Intermediate People’s Court in 2008.

The case was retried twice, while the provincial high people’s court upheld, in 2012, the original verdict of death for the two men.

However, China’s top court said in its statement issued on June 5 that the sentences were not reasonable as the men’s behavior did not reach the “most serious” line defined in the current criminal law. It sent the case back to the provincial high people’s court for retrial.

Xu Tianqiao, Qin’s lawyer, said during the Friday trial that his client stopped a fellow inmate, Zhou Lanlan, from committing suicide in the prison, which should be identified a meritorious deed under the law.

“Because of this, Qin should be given a lighter sentence,” Xu said, though the court did not accept the argument.

It did not render a judgment at the end of the trial.

Tang Hui, the girl’s mother, said after the hearing that she does not know what new sentence will be given to the two men, “but in my eyes, they deserved harsher punishment for their damage to my girl”.

The case received wide attention in part because Tang was ordered — unjustly, in the eyes of many — to serve 18-months in laojiao, or re-education through labor, in 2012 for repeatedly petitioning local authorities about the case.

Then 40 years old, she was released within a week after her story triggered a storm of public outrage, and she applied for State compensation.

Tang failed to get any compensation. She then sued the Yongzhou laojiao administrative committee at the local court and won the case in July.