Taiwan | Death penalty issue ignored

A death-row inmate waiting for news of execution, potentially with notice of only 30 minutes, is subject to a form of physical and psychological torture, and that torture is being perpetuated by the state. 

In a country where the death penalty exists, whether or not a current moratorium holds, for an inmate that has been on death row for decades this torture is amplified and drawn out beyond measure. If the individual is guilty of their crimes, it could be debated whether this form of retributive justice is appropriate. If they have been wrongfully convicted, that argument is obliterated.

The most recent execution in Taiwan was in 2020, but there are 38 prisoners on death row. A country that continues to uphold the death penalty would have to be very confident about the robustness of its judicial system, the reliability of investigations — including how confessions of guilt are obtained — the quality of verdicts handed down in the nation’s courts, and the adequacy of systemic checks and balances. That country is not Taiwan, which remains in dire need of judicial reform.

Supreme Court statistics show that about 30 percent of the rulings handed down by the court of second instance in 2020 were thrown out or remanded on appeal. That is unacceptably high. In addition to the Supreme Court, a further check on wrongful convictions is the Control Yuan, and there is a debate at the moment — and public consensus on — the abolition of that institution and the transfer of its duties to the executive or legislative branches. The government has said that it intends to abolish the Control Yuan, but is dragging its feet.

One often-cited example of the serious flaws in the system is the case of Chiou Ho-shun (邱和順), who was given the death penalty in 1987 for the alleged murder of schoolboy Lu Cheng (陸正). Chiou has been on death row since 1989 and is still waiting to learn his ultimate fate, despite serious reservations about the evidence used in his case, including suspicions that his confession was extracted using torture.

On June 25 last year, human rights groups urged President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) to pardon Chiou. Control Yuan member Kao Yung-cheng (高涌誠), who is vice chairman of the National Human Rights Commission, said that the Control Yuan has presented four reports over the years on Chiou’s case, concluding that he did not participate in the murder and should be acquitted. Tsai has refused to pardon Chiou; it seems that nobody is listening to the Control Yuan on this issue.

On Friday, an international panel of human rights experts, which had conducted a review of Taiwan’s implementation of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), called on the government to end the “cruel and degrading” practice of capital punishment. Austrian human rights lawyer Manfred Nowak, who was on the panel, said that capital punishment is a serious impediment to Taiwan’s progress on human rights issues.

Taiwan has invited human rights experts every four years to review the country’s implementation of the ICCPR and the ICESCR since 2013, when Nowak made similar remarks about capital punishment. Eight years later, it seems that nobody is listening to Nowak, either.

There is consensus between the Democratic Progressive Party and the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) on the desirability of abolishing the death penalty in Taiwan, but public opinion remains resistant to the idea. The issue is neither a legal nor a moral one; it is political.

Abolition needs to come as part of wider reform of the judicial system, but while the politicians bide their time, the state continues to perpetrate torture of its citizens, some of whom it knows to be innocent.

Source: taipeitimes.com, Editorial, May 19, 2022

🚩 | Report an error, an omission, a typo; suggest a story or a new angle to an existing story; submit a piece, a comment; recommend a resource; contact the webmaster, contact us: deathpenaltynews@gmail.com.

Opposed to Capital Punishment? Help us keep this blog up and running! DONATE!

"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted." -- Oscar Wilde