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Police culture judges the innocent
By Hsiao I-min ¿½¶h¥Á
On Friday last week, the Taiwan High Court found the three defendants in the
Hsichih Trio murder case ¡X Su Chien-ho (Ĭ«Ø©M), Liu Bin-lang (¼BªÃ¦) and Chuang Lin-hsun
(²øªL¾±) ¡X not guilty on the strength of the conclusion of a crime scene
reconstruction assessment by US forensic scientist Henry Lee (§õ©÷à±). For these
three men, this represents justice a long time in the making. The strain of 20
years of litigation for this case has also made itself felt on Taiwanese
society. But how did we get into this mess in the first place? If there is a
better example out there of embarking on a string of errors after having failed
to correct an initial misjudgment, I certainly am not aware of it.
On March 24, 1991, Wu Min-han (§d»Êº~) and his wife, Yeh Ying-lan (¸¬ÕÄõ), were
murdered in their home in Sijhih (¦Á¤î), Taipei County. A report from the Sijhih
precinct responsible for the investigation specified signs of a struggle at the
crime scene consistent with more than one perpetrator, saying that the police
had collected a number of suspicious fingerprints that they had submitted to the
Criminal Investigation Bureau (CIB). According to a Chinese-language newspaper
report the following day, the police were working on the hypothesis that there
had been more than one perpetrator.
After five months searching for matching fingerprints, conscript Wang Wen-hsiao
(¤ý¤å§µ) was arrested on Aug. 14. The police announced that they were still looking
for Wang¡¦s accomplices, as his fingerprints were just one set among several
found at the crime scene. Two days after his arrest, police said they had
extracted the -identities of the alleged accomplices from Wang, leading to the
arrest of three other men. The police then pronounced the case closed. In
October of that same year, prosecutors charged Su, Liu and Chuang.
The defense lawyer appointed for the three men, Su Yiu-chen (Ĭ¤Í¨°), on reading
the indictment in court, discovered that, with the exception of the individual
confessions, there was nothing by way of evidence supporting the police¡¦s case.
There wasn¡¦t any sign of the fingerprint results that had led to the original
indictment. In his initial argument on Oct. 2, Su Yiu-chen said that police had
revealed that they had found four different fingerprints at the scene of the
crime, including one containing traces of blood that had incriminated Wang.
There were no further details concerning the other fingerprints. If the other
fingerprints also had traces of blood on them and they did not belong to the
defendants, Wang clearly had accomplices other than those he had implicated. The
lawyer then requested that the police account for where the other four
fingerprints they claimed to have found had gone.
The Shilin District Court requested, on several occasions, access to the police
files detailing Wang¡¦s fingerprints. In an attempt to confirm whether other
fingerprints actually existed, the judge issued two subpoenas calling the police
to account, but they simply maintained that there were several fingerprints
found at the scene, but they could not be produced at the time. The police also
embellished the facts of the case, insisting that more than one person had been
involved. In the end, the collegiate bench of the court of first instance took
the police on their word and delivered a guilty verdict, handing down the death
sentence to the three defendants. The evidence listed on the verdict was the
written appraisal of Wang¡¦s fingerprints, a truncheon, a small purse (containing
a bunch of keys) and stolen money amounting to NT$24.
After the appeal, the defendants and their lawyers continued to press for the
whereabouts of the other fingerprints. Finally, on July 1, 1992, the Sijhih
precinct conceded to the High Court that the other three fingerprints found on
the crime scene had also belonged to Wang. As it turned out, there never were
four different fingerprints, and the claim that there had been four people
involved in the case was simply an assumption on the part of the police. It was
this initial assessment that made the police doubt the veracity of Wang¡¦s
confession that he had been alone that night. They beat a further confession out
of him, he named names and three innocent men were suddenly implicated in the
murder.
The errors did not end there. After 10 years of retrials, the courts had
confirmed that the truncheon, the purse and the small change had nothing to do
with the three defendants, that they were all planted by the police. The initial
mistake over the four different fingerprints may well have been the result of
human error during the initial forensic assessment, but the subsequent
falsification and planting and suppression of evidence were all clearly
irregularities committed by police at the Sijhih precinct to conceal both the
fact that they had extracted information under torture and their own litany of
errors that followed. If they hadn¡¦t managed to pull the wool over the eyes of
the prosecutors and the judges, Su Chien-ho, Liu and Chang would not have been
dragged through the courts for two decades.
Taiwan is a civilized society based on the rule of law, so how is it that the
system still allows miscarriages of justice, and the law is trampled by law
enforcers preoccupied solely with closing cases? Now that the Hsichih Trio case
has finally been put to rest after 20 years of litigation, the most pressing
issue for society to face up to is how we can end the police culture of seeking
to close cases irrespective of whether the true perpetrators are caught.
Hsiao I-min is the secretary for the Hsichih Trio case in the
Humanistic Education Foundation.
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