Hungry Ghosts

Original site

Double jeopardy: victims' families seek justice

Part II: Have anti-death-penalty activists gone too far?

Global Post, Feb. 10, 2011

TAIPEI, Taiwan — The prosecutors in black-and-purple robes yawned, fidgeted, even dozed through many of the High Court hearings.

But throughout the trial, a 60-year-old man with thinning hair, wearing red-framed glasses and a plain jacket, listened intently from the row behind them. It was Wu Tang-jie, older brother of the male victim.

In an interview at his lawyer's office in Taipei in June, Wu said he had attended every hearing he could in the case's 19-year course. A counselor at a Taipei prison, he used his vacation days to represent the family in court.

He insisted that all the evidence pointed “obviously” to the guilt of the Hsichih Three.

How could one person with one weapon have inflicted so much gore? How could the victims’ 7- and 8-year-old children have slept through the horror, unless two or more assailants covered the victims' mouths to stop their screams?

In the middle of the interview, Wu pulled from a folder two large, double-sided laminated photos and placed them on the table. Garish red jumped out first. Then a closer look: a mutilated head and blood-matted hair, in gruesome close-up. It was Wu's brother and his brother’s wife, both 37 at the time of death, in blown-up police photos from the crime scene.

"If people who oppose the death penalty could see these pictures, I think they would change their minds," he said softly. "People who want to abolish the death penalty don't have family who were killed like this, so they don't have sympathy."

"The victims’ feelings, before they die — nobody can know that," he said, peering over the photos. "No one can write it down."

Wu said he thought the death penalty could deter serious crimes. "You will consider that you could be put to death before you commit a crime," he said. "If there was no death penalty, people would do whatever they want."

He said there should be a law to better take care of victims’ families, saying the two children of the murdered couple had “no help.”

He was clearly bitter at how the Hsichih Three had become a cause celebre for human rights and anti-death-penalty groups, while his family has suffered with little support. “We think we are a minority — nobody cares about us,” he said.

"Everybody speaks for people who are still alive," he said. "But what about the rights of the dead? My brother and his wife can't return from the dead. The law should give them justice."

Wave of sympathy

Last March a candlelight vigil was held to show solidarity with relatives of victims of heinous crimes, like Wu. It was timed as a rebuke to the justice minister, who had vowed not to execute anyone on her watch (the minister later resigned amid the backlash.) One of the vigil’s organizers was 35-year-old Chu Hsueh-heng.

Chu became interested in the death penalty while working on a government-commissioned research project that involved online polling on social issues. He started contacting victims' families, digging into archives, and researching the issue.

He said the anti-death-penalty movement had good intentions, and was "brave" in its initial opposition to political executions in the last days of martial law (1949-1987). Civil society efforts eventually bore fruit: Taiwan paid out some $650 million in compensation for more than 7,000 wrongful verdicts during the martial law era, including nearly 900 executions, according to Taiwan’s Humanistic Education Foundation.

But activists had gone too far, said Chu. "In the past three to five years, almost all the people they are defending are not innocent." He said activists and the government should be doing more to give legal help and a support system to victims' families.

Worse, he accused the government of keeping victims' families in the dark, by starting a de facto moratorium on the death penalty without public debate on the issue. Chu called that policy "immoral."

"The government was doing something behind our backs," said Chu. "They were using a loophole as a way to delay the process, and didn't tell the public."

Victims' families "thought we would provide support," said Chu. "But our government didn't do the job well, so they feel cheated."

"Most of the victims' families support the death penalty," he said. "Maybe it's not right by high moral standards. But it’s like closure for them.” Long, drawn-out cases with no result, like the Hsichih Three case, were “like a torture” for victims’ relatives said Chu, and they “want to stop the torture.”

"'Where is the justice society promised me?' they say. 'When I get it, I'll be able to sleep at night, and I can start to forget. Then I can start to forgive.'"

Read the rest of Double jeopardy:

Original site

Double jeopardy: trend toward abolition

Part III: The majority of Taiwanese and Japanese support the death penalty.

Global Post, Feb. 10, 2011

TAIPEI, Taiwan — Worldwide, the death penalty is on the decline.

In 2009, only one-third (58) of the world’s countries kept the death penalty on the books, according to Amnesty International; only 18 of those carried it out. For the first time in history Europe had zero executions; in the Americas, only the United States carried out the death penalty.

Asia is a holdout. It leads the world in executions, thanks to China. Beijing refuses to divulge numbers on how many it puts to death; Amnesty estimates “thousands” per year, including political criminals. Vietnam was a distant runner-up in 2009 with more than nine executed.

Elsewhere in Asia, though, capital punishment is on the wane. The Philippines abolished the death penalty in 2006. India executed just one person from 1999 to 2008.

South Korea, which like Taiwan has moved from dictatorship to democracy, hasn’t executed anyone since 1997, although it recently upheld the constitutionality of the death penalty.

Activists in Japan are pushing for abolition. The center-left government has only put two to death since taking power in the fall of 2009. In those cases, the justice minister allowed the media into the execution chamber for the first time, and called for public debate.

Popular support

Despite those trends, a majority of Taiwanese — 70 to 80 percent, depending on the poll — still supports the death penalty. In Japan it’s 85 percent.

In a 2006 report, the International Federation of Human Rights (IFHR) found that most Taiwanese explained their support in terms of a "cultural belief in retribution.”

"There is a belief that human nature can be fundamentally evil and irredeemable, that serious criminals should pay for their crimes with their lives and that extreme punishment is needed to curb behavior," the IFHR found. "There is a fear that if the death penalty is removed, the social order will disintegrate."

The IFHR report noted, though, that some 50 percent polled also think life sentences without possibility of parole could be substituted for the death penalty.

Taiwan sociologist and death penalty opponent Chiu Hei-yuan said Taiwan’s capital punishment was rooted in universal ideas of vengeance, but took Chinese forms. Interestingly, Taiwan's Austronesian aborigines had no tradition of the death penalty, he said, but the Chinese who settled Taiwan did.

"In Chinese culture, the death penalty is a very important institution for maintaining social order and the ruling government's power,” he said.

Chinese history is packed with gruesome punishments, such as execution to the “ninth degree” — wiping out an entire clan for one man’s treason against the imperial family. Condemned men were often paraded in public before being killed, and peasants would jostle to dip buns of bread in the fresh blood of the executed, said Chiu. "They thought it was good for your health, and for curing illness.”

Paul Katz, a historian at Taiwan’s Academia Sinica, said Chinese judicial tradition often featured a presumption of guilt. "The idea has always been that if you were brought into court, it was a shameful indication that something was wrong — mediation had failed," he said. "The burden of proof was always on the person being accused."

That was true also under martial law in Taiwan, said Katz, when the Kuomintang’s totalitarian spy and security apparatus operated with impunity. "If you were caught up in the state's web, you must have done something wrong and it was up to you to prove that you were innocent."

Torture to extract confessions from suspected political enemies was routine. Kangaroo courts sent thousands before firing squads.

In that context, the treatment of the Hsichih Three by cops and prosecutors was a reflexive habit of an authoritarian regime in its dying days.

Since democratization in the late '80s and early '90s, Taiwan has cast away much of that troubling legacy. Part of that is reducing the number of people it puts to death.

Executions declined from 32 in 1998 to just three in 2005, according to the 2006 IFHR report.

A thirst for vengeance

In 2005 Taiwan quietly put a moratorium on capital punishment. It wasn’t abolished, but no one was put to death, either.

But last year, public debate was reignited when the justice minister, under legislative questioning, vowed that no one would be executed on her watch. Two prominent murder victims' relatives — including a TV celebrity — took to the airwaves with emotional protests. They quickly attracted a groundswell of public support.

"This was an irrational movement; crowd behavior to ask the government to kill these criminals,” said Chiu, the sociologist.

The crowd got what it wanted. The justice minister resigned in March. Two months later, four death row inmates were shot to death, with the new justice minister saying their cases were extreme ones that had, by a Chinese saying, "made the gods and man alike tremble with rage."

The executions came despite what Amnesty described as “assurances” from the current president Ma Ying-jeou in June 2008 that Taiwan’s moratorium would continue.

Forty men remain on death row, according to rights groups, including 15 who had no lawyers at their final trials.

Still, Taiwan is moving toward abolition. A task force has met to chart the way forward on scrapping the death penalty. One human rights alliance has challenged the constitutionality of the death penalty in Taiwan, on behalf of most of the condemned men (a few refused to be part of the suit, saying they wanted to die.)

Pro-death-penalty groups say that until the laws are changed, executions should continue as legally mandated.

But rights groups make the reverse argument, saying Taiwan shouldn't put anyone to death until there's a ruling on the penalty's constitutionality.

"People who are against the abolition of the death penalty misunderstand," said Chiu. "They think if a guy's not killed, that means he's not guilty. They say, only if we kill him can we get justice. We don't think so."

Read more from Double jeopardy:

Original site

Double jeopardy: Presumed guilty

Part IV: The most outspoken of the Hsichih Three, Su Chien-ho, describes torture in detention.

Global Post, Feb. 10, 2011

TAIPEI, Taiwan — "They poured water on my face to make me afraid, like I was drowning," he recalled in a flat voice.

"They put water on a towel and put the towel on my face. They used an electric prod on my body, including my genitals. They slapped me and kicked me, and beat me with a stick, on the bottom of my feet."

The torture and questioning by police continued for more than 30 hours, he said. "I couldn't take it anymore, so I confessed.”

In an interview at the office of a human rights group in Taipei, Su Chien-ho, the most outspoken of the “Hsichih Three,” re-told the story he's been telling for nearly 20 years of his adult life.

He’s been whipsawed by Taiwan’s courts; found guilty and nearly executed, found innocent, then found guilty again.

Su is a lanky, rail-thin man, with unruly hair flopping over his glasses and a slight chin. His emaciated appearance suggests a man who has been physically wasted by his two-decade ordeal.

Eight witnesses support the Hsichih Three's alibis, he said, proving they were not at the crime scene at the time of the murders.

But when they hauled him in on Aug. 15, 1991, police at the local Hsichih police station weren't in any mood to listen to alibis. Lacking any physical evidence, they were under intense pressure to extract verbal confessions, said Su.

After police tortured him, prosecutors arrived at the station to take Su’s statement, he said. At one hearing in April, the court listened to a scratchy 19-year-old recording of that encounter. Over and over again, Su's weak, scared voice pleaded, sobbed, saying, "I didn't do anything, I didn’t do it. You must believe me.”

Finally he did sign a statement, though. "They said if I didn't sign it, I couldn't leave the station."

Su and a member of the defense team said the Hsichih police station chief and deputy station chief on duty in August 1991 have since been promoted to high-ranking jobs; they don’t know the whereabouts of the lower-ranking cop who carried out most of the alleged torture.

To this day, none of the cops involved have been punished. Prosecutors refused to charge them when Su tried to bring a lawsuit, despite Su's insistence that there was photographic evidence of his wounds from an exam before he left the police station in August 1991.

All of the cops involved in the case deny torture.

Waiting to die

Su spent the next nine years in detention. First he was alone in a 72-square-foot room, wearing five-pound shackles around his ankles for 24 hours a day. Inmates got 20 minutes a day outside.

"Most of the inmates developed mental illnesses," said Su. "I kept reading — otherwise I would have gone crazy."

After his first year, he got a roommate. Several inmates had committed suicide at his detention center, so authorities decided not to leave them isolated.

His final sentence — the death penalty — came down on Feb. 9, 1995.

From that point until his first retrial in 2000, the psychological pressure was intense. "Six to 10 days after you receive the final sentencing, it's random, you can't predict when they will come for you," said Su. "I faced the fear and pressure that it would be me, next, every day."

Some death row inmates prepared empty "red envelopes" (hong bao), used to give gift money in Chinese culture, to pass out to other inmates once their final sentence came down. Su once got one from a condemned man with a terse message of encouragement: "You will win your case." But inmates who insisted they were innocent or didn't deserve to die wouldn't give out red envelopes.

Such was the case when Su's final sentence came down, leaving him a week to live.

"I didn't want to" give out red envelopes "because that would be a sign that I had given in to the situation, and could never escape," he said. His parents came to see him. "They told me they had visited many temples and prayed to God, and they told me to keep the faith, there might still be a chance for me to get out," he said.

Typically, Taiwan death row inmates are taken from their cells without notice in mid-evening. ("It used to be in the morning, but nearby residents said it was too terrifying, so they changed the schedule," said Lin Hsin-yi, of the Taiwan Alliance to End the Death Penalty.) Some cops burn incense to the god of the underworld at small altars near the execution sites, to notify him another soul is on the way.

The condemned are given a last meal and asked for their last words. Then they’re injected with a powerful anesthetic, so strong it sometimes kills them, according to Lin. They're made to lie face-down on a blanket, then shot in the back, through the heart. If they've agreed to donate an organ, they're shot in the head.

Superstitious cops treat the spent execution bullets as amulets, believing they can repel demons, according to Taiwan media reports.

While waiting, Su wrote goodbye letters to his family, to his supporters, to his attorney.

"I believe there is a spirit, a God above this world, but I don't believe in any particular religion," said Su. "But I thought, if I get out I will devote most of my time to human rights causes. This was sort of my negotiation with God."

On Feb. 20, Taiwan’s top prosecutor, under pressure from rights groups, filed a rare, 11th-hour appeal to halt the execution. The Supreme Court rejected the appeal. Two more appeals were filed; both failed. By mid-August, Su’s options were exhausted. Only the justice minister’s signature stood between him and the execution chamber.

That minister — now Taiwan’s president — refused to sign the orders. So did his successors. And so Su got an indefinite reprieve.

For all of that, Su has a surprisingly unemotional take on capital punishment. "Any innocent person could find themselves in my position one day," said Su calmly. “They could be declared a criminal, like me.”

"So I support the abolition of the death penalty because it's a very problematic system. That's pretty much it."

Contradictory opinions

Lin, of the anti-death-penalty alliance, said public opinion polls paint a confusing picture. Although a majority backs capital punishment, 80 percent of Taiwanese also don't trust their judicial system, and think it must make mistakes.

To explain that apparent contradiction, she said many Taiwanese believe it's worth killing one innocent person if it will help save many others' lives. Most people never believe they'll be the one falsely accused. "They think, I won't be one of the people to pay this price," said Lin.

If they have money, they're probably right, she said. "Rich people, or those with social status, they don't worry, because if they get in this situation, they can afford a good lawyer."

She noted that the Innocence Project and others have documented wrongful convictions in the United States. (Since 1973, 138 people have been released from death row in the United States because of evidence they were innocent, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.) "But in Taiwan, we don't have this kind of information. Our legal system doesn't recognize that we even have these kinds of cases."

Lin said support for the death penalty had also been high in countries like France, Germany and Canada. But after the death penalty was abolished, support rates plunged.

What's more, 53 percent of Taiwanese are willing to accept a life sentence without the possibility of parole as a substitute for the death penalty, she said.

“The death penalty is often imposed after a grossly unfair trial,” wrote Amnesty International. “But even when trials respect international standards of fairness, the risk of executing the innocent can never be fully eliminated — the death penalty will inevitably claim innocent victims.”

In short, says Amnesty and other rights groups, the death penalty too often compounds the suffering of the original crime with the horror of executing an innocent man. That’s not justice, they say. It’s human sacrifice.

Read more from Double jeopardy:

(Original site)

Double jeopardy: A matter of 'face'

Part V: Why did it take the court 19 years to change its mind on the Hsichih Three?

Global Post, Feb. 10, 2011

TAIPEI, Taiwan — One Friday in late April last year, Wang Wen-chong, the brother of the marine convicted and executed for the murders, took the witness stand. He had named the Hsichih Three as accomplices in the murder in 1991, identifying them to police by their nicknames.

As such he was partly responsible for putting them on death row.

He described being hit in the head by police at the station, how they threatened to haul in his mother if he didn't confess, how he saw Su Chien-ho tied up, heard him scream in pain from another room.

He said he denied involvement in the murders, but police didn't write that down. "I told them I didn't do this, but they didn't believe me," he told the court. He remembered how cops told him the murders couldn't have been the work of just one man, "there must have been more people involved."

He described being beaten bloody, until he “couldn’t tell who were prosecutors and who were police.” At one point they stopped recording his testimony “because I said I didn’t do it.” Every time he denied involvement, they hit him again.

He finally confessed to acting as a “lookout,” as his brother and the Hsichih Three committed the crime.

He said he'd seen his brother doing drugs, smoking something off aluminum foil (probably amphetamines), but not on the night of the murders. “I didn't know it was serious,” he said.

The photos of six policemen from the Hsichih station were projected on the courtroom wall. Wang Wen-chong said he couldn’t identify the ones who had hit him. “I can’t speak carelessly,” he told the court, after glancing quickly at the wall.

Marshaling evidence

In most criminal trials in the United States, juries are instructed that the burden is on prosecutors to prove “beyond a reasonable doubt” the guilt of the accused.

In the Hsichih Three's retrial, before a panel of three judges, the burden of proof often seemed to lie with the defense. “From the start, there’s been no evidence in this case" to prove guilt, said Shau E-ming, a member of the defense team. “But they still sent them to death row. So we had to prove that these three men were innocent.”

Wang’s recollections added weight to the accusations of police torture. The most crucial testimony, though, was that of the foreign expert — Taiwanese-American forensic scientist Henry Lee, famous from the O.J. Simpson trial. Lee was brought to Taiwan by the defense to do a crime scene reconstruction and appear in court.

His forensic report concluded that the bedroom was so cramped as to make it unlikely that four assailants could have struggled violently against the two victims, in the poor visibility at the hour of the crime, without leaving more physical evidence.

Lee wrote that one strike with a meat cleaver could leave several different wounds on a body, making it possible for one attacker to have left 79 wounds on the couple in an explosion of violence.

"There is a high likelihood that Wang Wen-hsiao acted alone in committing this crime," Lee's report read. "It is highly improbable that four (4) suspects attacked two (2) victims simultaneously with the types of weapons [described by police] in such a confined space."

In their closing arguments in September, defense lawyers leaned heavily on Lee’s testimony to sway the judges. They focused, too, on the testimony of police torture and the lack of physical evidence tying the Hsichih Three to the murders.

"How is it possible that only Wang Wen-hsiao's physical evidence was left at the scene — but none from the other three?" one defense lawyer said. "Why didn't they find any hair, or blood beside Wang Wen-hsiao's? The prosecutors haven't met their responsibility for proof."

Another defense lawyer railed against the very fact that the three were still defending themselves in court, two decades after the crime.

"The case has already dragged on 19 years and they're still on trial — is this the way the legal system should work?" he said with clear disgust. "This is blackening our country's reputation."

Catalyst for change

Why did the case drag on so long?

"Face," one defense lawyer said simply, putting his hand to his cheek, in a conversation in the lawyers' lounge after one hearing. He and others said it boiled down to the judicial system's embarrassment over making a mistake. (The lead prosecutor declined GlobalPost’s request for an interview.)

"One of the hardest things for the state to do is to admit that they screwed up," said Katz, the historian. The Taiwan Alliance to End the Death Penalty’s Lin agreed. When a second trial found the Hsichih Three innocent in 2003, "There was a lot of pressure from the victims' relatives, and the prosecutors lost face," said Lin.

Still, things have improved since the days when the Hsichih Three were first hauled in. This and other cases have spurred calls for reform. "The legal process is more open, police don't rough you up anymore," said Katz. "You can't get away with it anymore, like you could in the 1990s."

Taiwan has adopted a law putting a time limit on cases like the Hsichih Three’s. No longer can prosecutors drag out a case indefinitely. Legal reform advocates are also pushing for changes to how judges are chosen and promoted, to shake up a hidebound hierarchy where junior judges are afraid to go against their elders.

Taiwan now requires all police interrogations to be video-taped; that's still not the case in Japan, according to Shau, the member of the defense team, who also works for a human rights foundation. He said that neither Japan nor China had a historical idea of human rights, but that "Taiwan is different."

Unlike China and more so than Japan, Taiwan has an independent media, independent businesses and a thriving civil society with active non-governmental organizations. "All these can influence the government to support human rights," he said.

Taiwan is taking human rights concepts from the West and adapting them to what is "suitable" for Taiwan, he said.

"Some people say, 'You are Asian,' or 'You are Chinese.' Why do they say that? I am myself. There's no such thing as 'Asian people' — we are only individuals," said Shau. "A lot of people in Taiwan have a new belief in individual rights."

He called this a marked contrast to China, where the Communist Party government controls the justice system, sharply limits civil society and scorns human rights as a foreign annoyance. "In mainland China, if the government doesn't help you, no one can help you," he said. "In Taiwan, if the government can't help you, we are there to help. That's democracy."

As flawed as the Hsichih Three case had been, it could be worse, he said. "Because they are in Taiwan, they are still alive," he said. "In China they would have been killed already."

Mixed emotions

None of the prosecutors showed up on Nov. 12, when the verdict was read. Only Wu, the older brother of one of the victims, sat quietly on their side of the courtroom, a lone figure facing a phalanx of black-and-white robed defense lawyers, and, to his left, the Hsichih Three.

The spectators’ galley was packed, mostly with students and Hsichih Three supporters. The three judges took their places behind the raised desk, a tower of documents piled unsteadily in front of them among the tea cups.

The court police ordered everyone to rise and then the head judge read out the verdict — not guilty. Gasps and murmurs came up from the crowd.

Wu left the courtroom quickly with a blank expression. Outside he told reporters that he would try to get prosecutors to appeal again. "The injustice against my younger brother and his wife ..." he said, his voice breaking. "I don't know when it can be made right."

In the courtroom, Su Chien-ho hugged his lawyer for a long time, holding on until the lawyer’s eyes turned puffy. Outside, the three defendants and their lawyers gave a press conference, surrounded by a mob of TV cameras, microphones and well-wishers.

Their supporters started chanting "Justice, jiayou [an expression of encouragement]!,” "Taiwan, jiayou!"

Su, stopped by a reporter on the sidewalk outside the court, made a few comments. Then he turned and quickly loped away down the street, leaving the chants, lawyers, students and cops behind. He was free again.

Huang Guo-rong and Yang Chia-nin assisted with this report.

Read more from Double jeopardy: