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EDITORIAL: Saving the
face of justice
After 23 years behind bars as his murder and kidnapping trials dragged on, Chiou
Ho-shun (邱和順) finally knows his fate — he has been sentenced to be killed by the
state.
Taiwan’s longest-lasting legal case came to an abrupt close on Friday last week,
in a way that reaffirms both the need to reform the nation’s judicial system and
the inherent difficulty of doing so.
The Chiou trial had been cited for years by judicial reform advocates as an
example of the need to pass an act that would speed up legal procedures, finally
resulting in the Speedy Criminal Trials Act (刑事妥速審判法), which sets a maximum
detention period of eight years for accused murderers. However, the Supreme
Court’s recent decision to uphold his controversial death sentence shows how
even with the best of intentions, judicial reform can backfire.
Given the entrenched culture of “face” in the judicial system in Taiwan,
prosecutors and judges do everything they can to avoid ever admitting that they
were wrong, especially in cases of this magnitude that have been shunted back
and forth for years.
In the case of Chiou, who was accused of kidnapping and murdering a
nine-year-old boy more than two decades ago, prosecutors relied solely on
dubious confessions that were allegedly obtained through the use of threats and
torture.
Although Chiou’s guilt in another murder case — the kidnapping and killing of
insurance agent Ko Hung Yu-lan (柯洪玉蘭) — is fairly cut and dry, it was much
harder to link him to the slaying of the nine-year-old Lu Cheng (陸正): There was
no forensic evidence to back up the case — no murder weapon, no body and no
clothing belonging to the victim. However, the courts admitted the suspect’s
confessions to the crime because to throw them out would have meant admitting
they had been obtained wrongfully or faked altogether.
Amazingly, this “evidence” was still deemed admissible even after two
prosecutors and 10 police officers involved in the case were impeached for using
violence to obtain a speedy confession.
To some observers, it has long been obvious that the Chiou case was problematic.
Charges were dropped against most of the defendants, barring Chiou and two
accomplices, as discrepancies and contradictions emerged in the accounts of
those involved.
However, dropping the case entirely without a fall guy would have required
prosecutors, police and judges to admit to completely fouling up the case and in
the minds of those running the courts, that would have been tantamount to
admitting that the judicial system had failed.
The case was kicked back and forth like a soccer ball, with seemingly no end in
sight. The High Court did not want to drop the charges, but the Supreme Court
did not want to uphold them. In the meantime, Chiou spent most of his adult life
in jail.
After years of this farcical situation, along came the Speedy Criminal Trials
Act, which judicial reform activists hoped would finally put an end to
never--ending cases like Chiou’s. However, they underestimated the culture of
“face” and the determination of the courts to protect their reputation at any
cost.
With just a year to go before Chiou’s case would have run out of time and the
courts would have been forced to drop the case, the Supreme Court apparently
felt that time had come for it to clean its docket.
Instead of doing the right thing and dropping the charges against Chiou for the
murder of Lu Cheng, the Supreme Court upheld the death penalty, exhausting
Chiou’s final appeal on that case.
It is high time Taiwan’s judicial system embraced respect for human life and
judicial common sense, but as this case proves, single laws intended to regulate
the actions of the courts are simply not enough to change an ingrained culture
that has become a law unto itself.
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