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When death penalties go wrong
By Lin Feng-jeng 林峰正
Wednesday, May 19, 2010, Page 8
“In handling the case of the rape and murder of a little girl that happened at
the Air Force Operations Command in 1996, the Ministry of National Defense
contravened legal regulations by passing the whole case over to the
counter-intelligence team of the Air Force Command Headquarters’ Fourth
Political Warfare Department, which subjected the accused, Chiang Kuo-ching
(江國慶), to unlawful investigation and questioning.”
“This department’s investigative and trial units did not examine in detail the
arbitrary nature of Chiang’s confession and when they found out that there was
thought to be another suspect in the case, they compiled a report based on a
poor investigation, in which they ignored evidence which contradicted the
prosecution case. On this basis, they swiftly carried out the death penalty
against Chiang Kuo-ching.”
This passage is an extract from the Control Yuan’s report correcting the defense
ministry’s negligent handling of the case.
The case in question occurred 14 years ago. Military investigators had fixed
their sights on Chiang, an Air Force conscript, as a suspect in the girl’s rape
and murder. Before long, Chiang’s father, Chiang Chih-an (江支安), started
protesting, saying that his son had been falsely accused.
The Judicial Reform Foundation offered assistance by actively appealing to the
Control Yuan, but the defense ministry, under pressure to get the trial over
with quickly, condemned Chiang Kuo-ching to death little more than a year after
the crime occurred. He was executed by gunshot.
The only positive thing that came out of the case is that it did not fade away
following the execution. On the contrary, it provoked much discussion in the
legal profession and among media commentators, leading finally to the Control
Yuan’s official correction of numerous unlawful and negligent aspects of the
defense ministry’s handling of the case. In the interests of justice, the
Control Yuan has also called for the case to be reinvestigated.
Some people say the mistakes in this case were committed in a trial under
military law and that no such thing could happen now. The reality is quite the
contrary. Control Yuan members investigating Chiang’s case found that details of
the little girl’s rape and murder had much in common with those of another case
which happened around the same time in which a girl was raped with a bamboo
stake.
The Control Yuan team thinks it very likely that the two crimes were committed
by the same person. The suspect in the bamboo case also requested that these
similarities be investigated, but the trial judges did not heed the request.
Only years later, when the suspect in the bamboo case received a final
not-guilty verdict, did it emerge that prosecutors had gathered evidence in a
careless fashion when the case first occurred, making a follow-up investigation
impossible and leaving the case in limbo.
Some may think that such negligent, absurd and unlawful handling of a case could
only happen in a court martial, but isn’t it obvious that prosecutors’ handling
of the bamboo case under civilian law was not much different? The judges in that
case, too, did not consider possible leads when they should have and this led to
irreparable mistakes. Errors in the handling of these two cases caused Chiang
Kuo-ching’s life to be taken from him by the executioner’s bullet, and to the
tragedy of the man accused in the bamboo case being dragged through the courts
for 13 years before being acquitted. In addition, the dead victims cannot rest
in peace.
According to the US advocacy group Death Penalty Information Center, 139 death
row prisoners were exonerated and released in the US between 1976 and last year,
a number that continues to grow along with advances in forensic science.
Clearly, then, wrongful, mistaken and falsified cases are not just things of the
past, they are problems of the present. If such fatal errors can be made in the
US, whose judicial system is more refined than Taiwan’s, the situation in Taiwan
can hardly be any better.
The conclusion is clear. Chiang Kuo-ching’s wrongful conviction, which was
brought about, intentionally or through error, by those who investigated and
tried his case, has implications for the past and the present, and for both
military and civilian justice. We should be concerned about the malicious
handling of criminal cases. Those guilty of unlawful and negligent practices
should be severely punished, and everything possible should be done to
compensate for the harm done. More important still, efforts must be made to
improve the system, such as preventing torture and ensuring the right of the
accused to assistance from a lawyer. Judges and prosecutors should be monitored
and those guilty of malpractice removed from their posts.
No matter what improvements are made to the system, however, shortcomings will
inevitably occur. For example, until little more than a year ago, some
prosecutors of the justice ministry’s Investigation Bureau did not allow
attending defense lawyers to check the accuracy of interrogation records on
behalf of their clients. A regulation was enacted in 1997, demanding that
full-length audio-visual recordings must be made when the accused is being
questioned, but in practice some investigators still use unlawful means to force
those accused of crimes to confess, and then tape a staged note-taking that has
been rehearsed beforehand.
Whatever changes may be made to the system, some people will always find a way
around them. The reality is that, while the criminal procedure regulations
volumes get thicker and thicker, they will never be enough to eliminate unlawful
practices in the course of investigations and trials.
The recent furor over capital punishment has shown that most members of the
public think that a sentence, once confirmed, should be “carried out according
to the law,” and that he/she who takes a life should pay with their life, with
no room for negotiation. Looking back at Chiang Kuo-ching’s case, his conviction
was confirmed, too, but the Control Yuan later found the case to be full of
holes. Was Chiang Kuo-ching’s execution not an instance of carrying out the
sentence according to the law?
The mistake that was made can never be reversed and no amount of state
compensation can give Chiang’s father back his beloved son. If, as some insist,
he who takes a life must pay with his life, then who will pay with their life
when the state wrongfully executes a death row inmate? Who will take the bullet
for this injustice — the investigators, the prosecutors or the trial judges?
Lin Feng-jeng is a lawyer and executive director of the
Judicial Reform Foundation.
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