Brian Hioeby Brian Hioe
語言:
English
Photo Credit: Judicial Yuan
THREE MEN who served more than nineteen years on death row again have their case in the courts, with a ruling by the Supreme Court for a retrial in August of last year.
Chuang Lin-hsun, Liu Bin-lang, and Su Chien-ho were arrested in August 1991, with the accusation that they worked together with army conscript Wang Wen-hsiao to rob an apartment of its valuables. During the robbery, residents Yeh Ying-lan and her husband Wu Ming-han were bludgeoned to death, while Yeh was sexually assaulted.
Decades later, in 2010, the trio were cleared of wrongdoing after a forensic analysis that found Wang Wen-hsiao had most likely acted alone. Wang had since been executed by a military court. In English, the trio has been referred to as the “Xizhi Trio.”
In particular, the case is now seen as an instance in which police were under pressure to find a culprit and pinned the blame on innocent individuals. There were a number of such cases during the authoritarian period, including that of Taiwan’s longest prisoner on death row, Chiou Ho-shun, in which authorities are accused of pinning blame on individuals unconnected to a crime. This occurred due to the desire to come off as tough on crime and avoid the public perception that authorities were unable to find a culprit. Yet evidence from such cases has often gone missing or possibly never existed, and confessions of guilt from this period were often extracted through torture.
Nevertheless, the case of the Xizhi Trio also shows when prosecutors refused to let go of a case, resulting in unnecessary imprisonment. In May 2000, Chen Han, the public prosecutor-general at the time, made three extraordinary appeals for the case to be retried by the Supreme Court. As a result, in January 2003, the trio was acquitted by the High Court. But prosecutors appealed the case, leading to another retrial by the Supreme Court that sent the case back to the High Court, which sentenced them again to death.
At the time, Ma Ying-jeou was the Minister of Justice. Although often an outspoken figure in support of capital punishment, to his credit, Ma refused to sign the sentence against the Xizhi Trio, citing a lack of evidence. Eventually, another verdict by the High Court found the Xizhi Trio not guilty in November 2010, on the basis of problems with the initial evidence. The three were acquitted in 2012.
Even so, as advocates of abolishing capital punishment have raised, more than thirty-five years later, the Xizhi Trio still have to appear in court. Though the three were acquitted, the
surviving family members of Yeh Ying-lan and Wu Ming-han have refused to let go of the case. A compensation case from earlier this year sought 8.31 million NT compensation from the Xizhi Trio. A ruling by the High Court decided that the Xizhi Trio did not need to pay this amount, but that Wang’s mother would have to pay. It is generally thought that Wang committed the murders due to gambling debts. Indeed, it is also often the case that surviving family members refuse to let go of seeking prosecution, even in the event of a wrongful conviction.
It is to be seen whether the Supreme Court’s decision to remand the case means that a reevaluation of the case takes place. Many of Taiwan’s long-running capital punishment cases are still unresolved, even in cases where it is apparent that wrongful convictions took place. The partisan political environment around the issue of capital punishment, likewise, has in recent memory led to calls from the pan-Blue camp for the executions of all those still on death row.
Such calls take place because of the pan-Blue camp wishing to politically attack the DPP with the claim that the DPP is soft on the issue of capital punishment in a manner that allows for violent crime to take place. In turn, while the DPP is internally divided on the issue of capital punishment, the Tsai and Lai administrations have both evidenced a willingness to carry out executions in order to shore up public opinion. Polling, after all, shows that the public widely supports capital punishment–and this has proven an obstacle to overturning wrongful convictions against individuals who have sometimes been on death row for decades.