Brian Hioeby Brian Hioe
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Photo Credit: James9052311/WikiCommons/CC BY-SA 3.0
A LONG-ANTICIPATED ruling on capital punishment from the Constitutional Court yesterday did not result in the abolishment of the death penalty. Instead, the use of the death penalty is restricted to severe cases, such as involving murder.
As such, though this places further restrictions on the death penalty, capital punishment remains constitutional. The use of the death penalty will be decided on the basis of factors such as severity of the crime, motive, and amount of injury inflicted on victims. Yet this perhaps does not differ substantially from what existed before.
The ruling is not likely to please anyone. Civil society groups opposed to the death penalty have expressed disappointment in the ruling, seeing as the Constitutional Court has missed a chance to phase out capital punishment, bringing Taiwan in line with international human rights standards.
At the same time, the KMT has leaned into attacks on the ruling. New Taipei mayor Hou You-yi, for example, a former police officer, has criticized the apparent disregard for justice for victims. Advocates of capital punishment have also called for its swift resumption. Singer Pai Bing-bing, an advocate for the use of the death penalty after the murder of her daughter in 1997, has called for the execution of all of Taiwan’s 37 individuals on death row.
More broadly, the KMT has sought to frame the ruling as a de facto abolition of the death penalty. Poll after poll, whether conducted by civil society groups opposed to capital punishment or groups in favor of it, show that Taiwanese society overwhelmingly supports the use of the death penalty, presumably with the view that it offers a social deterrent to violent crimes.
The Constitutional Court. Photo credit: Jiang/WikiCommons/CC BY-SA 3.0
In past campaigns, the KMT suggested that the DPP was allowing the number of violent crimes to increase in Taiwanese society by not employing capital punishment. The KMT politically benefits from the perception that the Lai administration abolished the death penalty, then. The KMT is also likely to raise the issue of capital punishment to try and block appointments by the DPP to the Constitutional Court, with a number of justices set to retire in October.
To this extent, it is expected that the 37 individuals on death row may final extraordinary appeals, having exhausted other options. The Supreme Prosecutors Office has stated that it will file appeals for two prisoners, Chen Yi-lung and Huang Chun-chi, as the laws justifying their executions were overturned, while it is examining options for the other 35 individuals on death row.
In many ways, the issue of capital punishment in Taiwan goes back to the authoritarianism period. A number of individuals on death row are there because of confessions extracted by torture, as in the case of Chiou Ho-shun, Taiwan’s longest-serving death row inmate. In 2015, police officers who had been part of the case testified that they had tortured Chiou, and eight of the twelve individuals who faced charges over the case were minors at the time. It is generally thought that with Chiou, or other cases, martial law-era law enforcement sought to pin blame on them in order to avoid appearing unable to solve cases of violent crimes.
In this way, the debate regarding capital punishment has not been resolved after the ruling, merely postponed. The Lai administration is likely to maintain the de facto moratorium of the Tsai administration on capital punishment, in that while capital punishment was on the books, it mostly did not carry out executions.
That being said, the Tsai administration did carry out executions in 2018. This was a clearly politically motivated move, seeing as this took place shortly before elections, as a way to shore up popularity. The executed had profiles similar to individuals responsible for cases of violent crimes in preceding years that had captured the attention of Taiwanese society, pointing to how the execution was calculated to appeal to the public.
More generally, this points to how both major political parties in Taiwan politicize the issue of capital punishment. Justice for those on death row who were wrongly accused, but have not yet been exonerated, or discussion of rehabilitative measures rather than punitive ones as capital punishment, still seems to be far away. Indeed, the Constitutional Court ruling took a middle-of-the-road position, likely to avoid angering either political camp and the general public, and yet in trying to please all parties, it may please nobody.