Taiwan’s first trial with the participation of “citizen judges” began on Tuesday at the New Taipei City District Court, and the verdict was quickly delivered on Friday, opening a new chapter in the nation’s judicial system while inevitably bringing new problems and challenges.
On Monday, the court completed the selection of citizen judges by picking six citizen judges and four alternate judges from the 57 prospective judges present. For the selection, what deserves greater attention is the rejection rate of candidates who were legally notified of their candidacy, especially the percentage of those who did not respond.
Article 99, Paragraph 2 of the Citizen Judges Act (國民法官法) states that a prospective citizen judge may be fined not more than NT$30,000 for “being absent on the citizen judges selection date without a justifiable reason after having been lawfully summoned.” The court would not easily impose a fine when the citizen judge system is newly established.
However, the citizen judge selection might be too narrow if candidates’ rejection rate is too high, thus contravening the principle of universality.
Next, since trials with citizen judges must proceed in a concentrated and efficient manner, the period of each trial is three days.
However, the Citizen Judges Act adopts the “indictment-only” principle, meaning that to prevent any pretrial judgement, prosecutors only submit the indictment, without the evidence, to the court when he indicts someone.
However, this also means that all the content and evidence of the case can only be presented during the three-day trial period. How citizen judges, who sit on the judgement seats for the first time in their lives, can quickly absorb the evidence presented by prosecutors and the defense, and the statements made by the witnesses and expert witnesses in just three days is a serious issue.
In the case before the New Taipei City District Court — which involved a Taiwanese wife who killed her husband saying that he had abused her — it was necessary to consider whether the wife who had been allegedly abused for years really had the “capacity for responsibility” for her action at the time of the act.
Since this difficult task involved a forensic psychiatric evaluation, it was a big challenge for citizen judges to quickly grasp the information and determine the wife’s criminal responsibility quickly. Under such circumstances, the prosecutor, lawyer and even experts should present the difficult legal terms and relevant professional knowledge in a simple way to be understood by citizen judges.
Lastly, the judges’ final deliberation after the final argument in court might be an even greater challenge. During the first three years of the implementation of the Citizen Judges Act, trials involving citizen judges are to be limited to certain categories, including cases “where the accused has intentionally committed an offense that caused death.” So the jury is often to face the crimes of intentional homicide in trials. For such crimes, the argument lies in whether the defendant has the “capacity of responsibility” and whether to impose the death penalty. In terms of a verdict of guilty or a decision of death penalty, it is rendered “by the approval of the tribunal with a two-thirds majority, including at least one judge and one citizen judge.”
However, with three judges and six citizen judges deliberating together, and with the former having the exclusive authority of legal interpretation, how can we strike a balance between professional legal assistance and independence of citizen judges’ judgement, so as to prevent them from becoming rubber stamps? This is an critical test for judicial reform.
Wu Ching-chin is an associate law professor at Aletheia University.
Translated by Eddy Chang
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