The defendant sentenced to death 11 times in Taiwan’s longest ongoing criminal case has no hope that his newest retrial will be any different, his lawyer said yesterday on the opening day of the trial at the Taiwan High Court.
“Chiou Ho-shun [邱和順] lost hope long ago,” lawyer Stephen Lee (李勝雄), who has represented Chiou at all 11 retrials, said in an interview.
This is the 12th time the Taipei branch of the Taiwan High Court hears the case, which has been roundly condemned by the Judicial Reform Foundation and strongly criticized by Amnesty International for a series of flaws — most notably the submission of coerced confessions as evidence and the lack of forensic evidence linking the defendants to the crimes.
At the opening hearing yesterday, the presiding judge said the 21-year-old case had been tried so many times that the details should be clear by now. He said he had hope the court would bring a “speedy” conclusion to the case, adding that the court’s duty was “of course, also to be fair.”
Chiou became upset and raised his voice as he gave a brief statement to the court calling for justice, whereupon the judge asked him to calm down and repeated that the trial would be speedy and fair.
Amnesty’s Asia-Pacific regional office in Hong Kong released a statement on Monday calling for a fair trial and urging the High Court to heed flaws in the case cited by the Supreme Court last month when it ordered this latest retrial.
Those flaws included the lack of forensic evidence.
“As of today, no material evidence such as the murder weapon ... [has] been found,” Amnesty said, calling on the court to honor the presumption of innocence.
Amnesty also criticized previous trials for including confessions extracted through torture in the rulings.
Chiou and two co-defendants are charged in a case that combines two separate murders, originally with 12 defendants. Chiou stands accused in the presumed murder of 10-year-old Lu Cheng (陸正), who was kidnapped in Hsinchu in 1987 but whose body was never found, and the murder of Ko Hung Yu-lan (柯洪玉蘭), an insurance agent. Lin Kun-ming (林坤明) is also accused in both murders, while the third defendant, Wu Shu-chen (吳淑貞), is accused in the Lu murder.
Of the other original defendants, one died in prison, while the rest lost hope during their trials of any acquittal and chose to begin serving their prison sentences rather than continue appealing.
At the 10th retrial, Lin and Wu were sentenced to 17 and 11 years respectively, while Chiou again received the death penalty.
“Every time, I hope that this time the retrial will be different. All the lawyers involved in the case believe these people are innocent, otherwise they wouldn’t have gotten involved,” Lee said.
Chiou and Lin have been detained throughout their successive trials, while Wu was freed and lives at home although not acquitted.
“They keep finding her guilty, yet they released her without bail. It is a very strange [action on the part of the court],” Lee said.
In the 1990s, allegations of grievous faults in the case led then-prosecutor Wang Ching-feng (王清峰), now minister of justice, to investigate. After evidence emerged that the defendants had been tortured into confessing, the Control Yuan in 1994 impeached the police officers implicated.
In 2003, police also admitted that a man sentenced to death in a separate criminal case had confessed to Lu’s murder before his execution.
At the last High Court trial, a team of lawyers from the nonprofit Legal Aid Foundation’s Taipei and Banciao branches joined the defense counsel and raised several issues, including an alibi indicating that Chiou and his codefendants were not in Hsinchu at the time of Lu’s kidnapping.
The court nevertheless upheld the convictions on April 13. The case then went before the Supreme Court, which ordered a retrial on Aug. 6.
In a joint statement with other civic groups on Monday, the Judicial Reform Foundation said: “The key issue is this ... Despite the lack of evidence, the judges are not willing to [honor] the most basic of judicial principles: the presumption of innocence.”
The Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) on Friday condemned Chinese and Russian authorities for escalating regional tensions, citing Chinese warplanes crossing the Taiwan Strait’s median line and joint China-Russia military activities breaching South Korea’s air defense identification zone (KADIZ) over the past two days. A total of 30 Chinese warplanes crossed the median line of the Taiwan Strait on Thursday and Friday, entering Taiwan’s northern and southwestern airspace in coordination with 15 naval vessels and three high-altitude balloons, the MAC said in a statement. The Chinese military also carried out another “joint combat readiness patrol” targeting Taiwan on Thursday evening, the MAC said. On
Singapore is to allow imports of Taiwanese raw pork for the first time in 15 years, the Ministry of Agriculture said yesterday. The Singapore Food Agency has approved imports of fresh pork produced by New Taipei City-based Cha I Shan Foods, which had obtained a Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points (HACCP) certification from the ministry to export to Singapore, it said. The ministry said it had hoped Singapore would permit Taiwanese fresh pork imports in addition to processed pork products. Singapore agreed to accept Taiwanese fresh pork after completing a document review and a virtual tour of Cha I Shan Foods’ packing
‘FACT-BASED’: There is no ban, and 2 million Taiwanese have traveled to China this year, which is more than the 285,000 Chinese who visited Taiwan, the council said The Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) yesterday accused China’s Taiwan Affairs Office (TAO) of shifting the blame for Beijing’s tourism ban on Taiwan, continuing a war of words that started in the past week. The council’s remark came hours after its Chinese counterpart on Friday accused the government of creating barriers to the resumption of reciprocal group tours across the Taiwan Strait. The TAO accused the MAC of releasing untruthful information and dragging its feet on the tourism sector’s call to establishing ferries linking Pingtung County to China’s Pingtan Island. The MAC failed to respond to overtures to restore direct flights and raised the
Taipei Mayor Chiang Wan-an (蔣萬安) yesterday said the city “does not tolerate violence” after the Taipei City Council reported death threats over a planned screening today of a documentary on alleged forced organ harvesting in China. The council’s report follows a flurry of similar threats targeting theaters and institutions screening the documentary, titled State Organs, which accuses Chinese officials of harvesting organs from incarcerated dissidents and Falun Gong members. Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) city councilors who planned to screen the film told a news conference earlier yesterday that the organizers of the screening had received a threat of a knife attack signed
RSS