President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) has secured a second term. Now, Taiwanese must wait to see whether she can deliver some of the much anticipated reforms she promised for her first term, but was ultimately unable to achieve. The whole nation is watching.
Over the past three-and-a-half years, her performance on judicial reform has been wanting. Obvious items of interest would to fix the law to allow non-prosecution of minor offenses and the decriminalization of defamation, as shown by a couple of actual examples.
Many years ago, a person complained to the Nantun District (南屯) police precinct in Taichung that a neighbor had poured themselves a glass of water — worth perhaps NT$1 — from a faucet in the corridor outside their apartment. The person who contacted the police considered this theft and insisted on taking the neighbor to court.
The precinct’s chief, a young officer, tried to convince the person not to press charges, even offering to pay NT$100 in compensation from their own pocket, but to no avail.
As theft is an indictable offense, the police had no choice but to bring in the suspect and hand the case over to prosecutors.
After all this trouble, the case was, of course, dismissed, but not before the defendant and the police had been put through a huge amount of inconvenience.
Another example involves police officers from the Fengyuan precinct in the then-Taichung County.
Officers patrolling the area came across a woman, trowel in hand, digging up a garden cosmos flower worth perhaps NT$2 from the side of the road. They took her to the police station and processed her, and — because a trowel could be considered a lethal weapon — referred the case to prosecutors.
When media reported the incident, there was a public outcry. The head of the precinct received a major demerit and was demoted to a non-ranking position.
Still, the prosecutors took the case to court and charged the woman with aggravated larceny, as the spade was a “lethal weapon.” The defendant was found not guilty.
Another case involved an elderly scrap collector who picked up a cardboard box from the side of the road that she believed had been discarded. Someone claiming to own the box reported her.
Again, the police were obliged to detain her and refer the case to prosecutors, and again the case failed to reach a guilty verdict.
These are obvious cases of minor offenses that should not have been criminal matters, but the Criminal Code does not grant police the authority to deal with such incidents themselves.
As it stands, the law requires that such cases be referred to prosecutors, and prosecutors will sometimes just go through the motions and pursue them as aggravated larceny, putting the defendants through hell.
Furthermore, many criminal cases that are prosecuted today are over defamation, and there have long been calls for this offense to be decriminalized.
Is it really so difficult for this to happen? There is no reason that defamation cannot be dealt with through compensation in a civil case.
Wang Po-jen is a media commentator.
Translated by Paul Cooper
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