20100503 Executions came out of the blue

Executions came out of the blue

Monday, May 03, 2010, Page 8

The government executed four men at 7:30pm on Friday night, ending a moratorium on executions that had been in place since December 2005.

Premier Wu Den-yi (吳敦義) said yesterday that the government was simply upholding the rule of law and practicing social justice. The country must handle death row inmates according to the law unless there are legal reasons to justify suspending executions, he said.

The crimes for which the four were convicted met the current criteria for crimes meriting capital punishment: kidnapping and murder or multiple murders. However, whether all the legal requirements for carrying out the death penalty had been met and the timing of the executions are questionable.

Less than two months ago, former minister of justice Wang Ching-feng (王清峰) resigned over the furor that erupted when she refused to enforce the death penalty. Her successor, Minister of Justice Tseng Yung-fu (曾勇夫), told a public hearing on April 21 that the ministry would review the cases of all 44 inmates on death row and exhaust all measures before conducting executions. He also said the first executions would most likely take place before the end of the year.

Therefore, given both the moratorium and the Council of Grand Justices’ agreement to hear appeals of death-sentence cases, there was something unseemly about the rush to enforce the law. The council had given the Taiwan Alliance to End the Death Penalty (TAEDP), which filed a request for an interpretation on behalf of the 44 people on death row, until today to submit letters of authorization from the prisoners.

Government officials have consistently cited opinion poll findings that a majority of Taiwanese — 70 percent — favor keeping the death penalty. Yet other polls have found that 53 percent of respondents support replacing the death penalty with life imprisonment without parole. Sixty-two percent support commuting a death sentence to life or a long prison term if those convicted behave well in prison or show remorse, with 88 percent believe the death sentence could sometimes be handed down erroneously.

On April 8, Tseng told the legislature that even if most people said they supported the death penalty, the government would still push for abolition, though like other administration officials, he wouldn’t give a timetable.

News of the executions came on the same day as reports from Lebanon that a suspect in the murders of four family members had been lynched. A mob beat and stabbed the suspect to death, dragged his body through the streets so others could stomp on his corpse and then strung the body on a pole using a butcher’s hook. The Beirut government condemned the incident and vowed to punish those responsible, but some villagers quoted by wire agencies appear unrepentant about taking justice into their own hands.

The right to life should never be subject to opinion polls, just as a lynch mob should never replace the right to a fair trial. Protection of human rights means protecting people from shifting public opinion, shifts in political power and the arbitrary enforcement of justice.

While Friday night’s executions were not lynch mob justice, TAEDP executive director Lin Hsin-yi’s (林欣怡) characterization of them as hasty and furtive was absolutely spot-on.