Taiwan | Groups call for pardon of death row inmate

Human rights groups yesterday reiterated calls for a pardon of the nation’s longest-serving death row inmate, who has been incarcerated for 35 years.

Chiou Ho-shun was arrested in September 1988 following the disappearance of 10-year-old Lu Cheng, whose body was never found.

3 other men arrested in the case implicated Chiou, saying that he had planned the kidnapping.

Representatives of human rights groups call for death row inmate Chiou Ho-shun to be pardoned at a news conference in Taipei yesterday. Photo: Fang Pin-chao, Taipei Times

However, as more details surfaced, discrepancies emerged in the defendants’ accounts, including where the body had allegedly been disposed of.

Chiou had been “threatened and tortured [during interrogation] and the entire case is riddled with holes,” Chiou’s lawyer Lee Sheng-hsiung said during an appeal at the High Court in 2009.

Speaking at a news conference yesterday, timed to coincide with Chiou’s birthday, the groups urged Supreme Prosecutors’ Office prosecutor-general Hsing Tai-chao to re-examine Chiou’s case.

This would involve procedures by the High Prosecutors’ Office’s guilty verdict review committee, and the establishment of a cross-level and cross-jurisdictional platform to look at claims of injustice in the case and to ensure transparency, they said.

Attorney Greg Yo, who heads a group of non-governmental organization volunteer defense attorneys for Chiou, said that a number of investigations by the Control Yuan showed examples of judicial injustice in Chiou’s case.

Yo called the Supreme Court’s rejection of Chiou’s appeal “one of the greatest injustices of human society.”

“Aside from appealing to President Tsai Ing-wen to pardon Chiou, we have filed a petition to the review committee,” he said. “We hope the committee will re-examine the evidence and facts in the case, and we urge the High Prosecutors’ Office to apply for a retrial or extraordinary appeal on behalf of Chiou.”

A previous appeal by the volunteer lawyers in January 2020 was rejected by the committee pending the release of a report by the Control Yuan of its investigation of the case, and the group assisted Chiou to apply for the review, he said.

However, the committee has not come to a conclusion or explained the progress of its review, but has instead asked the Control Yuan and volunteer lawyers to explain their doubts about the case, he said.

The review committee should “replace confrontation with cooperation,” Taiwan Innocence Project executive director Lo Shih-hsiang said, adding that this was the purpose of its establishment 6 years ago.

“There are more than 100 cases of judicial injustice being redressed annually in the US. We urge the High Prosecutors’ Office to draw examples from successful cases in the US, and to revise the procedures of the review committee,” he said.

Source: Taipei Times, Staff, April 8, 2023

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