Taiwan verdict exposes
death-penalty danger By Dennis
Engbarth
TAIPEI, Sep 2 2012 (IPS) - The
end of Taiwan's most controversial death-penalty
case has "punctured the myth that the judicial
system never makes mistakes in death penalty
cases," Judicial Reform Foundation (JRF) executive
director Lin Feng-cheng told IPS.
A panel
of three High Court judges overturned murder
convictions and capital sentences August 31
against the so-called "Hsichih Trio" after 21
years of legal battles. Supporters of human rights
and opponents of the death penalty gathered at the
Taiwan High
Court Criminal Appeals
building cheered after Su You-chen, chairman of
the Chinese Association for Human Rights,
announced the "not guilty" verdicts for Su
Chien-ho, Chuang Lin-hsun and Liu Bin-lang.
The case began on March 23, 1991 when a
couple, Wu Ming-han and his wife Yeh Ying-lan,
living in Hsichih township near Taipei City were
found robbed and murdered, having been stabbed 79
times.
On August 13 1991, Wang Wen-hsiao,
a neighbor then serving in Taiwan's Marines, was
detained and then formally arrested two days
later, based on a fingerprint found at the murder
scene.
Wang initially confessed to have
conducted the killings alone, but police doubted
that Wang could have killed the couple by himself.
During interrogations by Hsichih precinct
police, Wang named three other 19-year-old
associates, Su Chien-ho, Chuang Lin-hsun and Liu
Bin-lang for helping him murder the couple after
robbing their home and raping Yeh.
The
three suspects confessed to the crimes to the
police and were charged with murder under the Act
for the Control and Punishment of Banditry at the
time, which provided for mandatory death
sentences.
Wang was convicted in military
court and executed on January 11, 1992 and never
directly faced Su and the other two suspects.
After judges refused to accept their
claims to have made false confessions under
torture, Su, Liu and Chuang were convicted in the
Shihlin district court on February 18, 1992 and
lost two appeals to the High Court before the
Supreme Court finalized their guilty verdicts and
imposed death sentences on February 9, 1995.
Although they would normally have been
executed within three days, then justice minister
(and now president and ruling Chinese Nationalist
Party chairman) Ma Ying-jeou refused to sign the
execution orders, returning the case to the
Supreme Court due to the lack of direct evidence.
The Control Yuan, Taiwan's watchdog branch
of government, launched a probe into the Su
Chien-ho case in March 1995 that found numerous
errors in the investigation and trial proceedings
by the Hsichih police bureau, the Shihlin district
court and the High Court.
The "Hsichih
Trio" or "Su Chien-ho" case became the focus of a
major global human rights campaign, and spurred
the drive by Taiwan civil society groups to push
for the abolition of the death penalty.
A
turning point came in June 2008 when renowned
criminologist Henry Lee Chang-yi undertook a
detailed investigation of the crime scene and
forensic data on behalf of the defendants and
concluded that "it is extremely likely that this
case was committed by Wang Wen-hsiao alone."
"This critical forensic research came
about because of civil society efforts and not the
court," Judicial Reform Foundation executive
director Lin Feng-cheng told IPS. "It was only
because this case attracted too much attention and
even became the subject of an international
campaign were we able to persuade Henry Lee to
come here."
Speaking for the trio, Su
Chien-ho said "21 years of trials and retrials has
turned us into middle-aged men and our youth is
long gone, but we now only have feelings of
gratitude and hope to return to normal lives."
"Senior judicial officials continue to
attempt to persuade society that the judicial
system never makes mistakes and this myth has
blinded many people, but the Su Chien-ho case is
an example of a finalized death penalty verdict
that was overturned and shown to be wrong," the
JRF spokesman told IPS.
"If their death
penalty verdicts had been implemented, they would
have been executed just like Chiang Kuo-ching" -
an Air Force private wrongfully executed in August
1997 after confessing under torture to a
rape-murder, said Lin. "This fact shows how
frightening the death penalty truly is."
President Ma, who as president has
overseen the ending of a nearly five-year
moratorium on the death penalty with nine
executions, told reporters August 31 that he hoped
that there would never again be such a case and
that there would no longer be cases in which
confessions were obtained through improper means
from suspects.
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