Taiwan’s Oldest Death Row Prisoner Denied Retrial by Supreme Court

TAIWAN’S OLDEST DEATH ROW prisoner, Wang Xin-fu, has been denied a retrial by the Supreme Court. This occurs despite the fact that Wang has consistently maintained his innocence and, in fact, did not commit the murders for which he is on death row.

In particular, Wang was sentenced to capital punishment in 2006 over the killing of two police officers at a karaoke bar in 1990. The shooting was committed by Chen Rong-jie, who was then 19.

Wang was accused of ordering the hit. It is believed that Wang’s confession of guilt was extracted through torture and intimidation.

Many of Taiwan’s current death row cases date back to the authoritarian period, during which it was common for confessions to be extracted through torture, or for evidence to be destroyed or go missing as part of cover-ups. Law enforcement officials were often under pressure to quickly find culprits, so as to not appear ineffectual, as a result of which they pinned the blame for crimes on unrelated individuals.

One well-known case is that of Chiou Ho-shun, Taiwan’s longest-serving death row inmate. In 2015, police officers who had been part of the case testified that they had tortured Chiou, and eight of the twelve individuals who faced charges over the case were minors at the time. Even so, Chiou has not been officially exonerated, though civil society groups have called on successive Taiwanese presidents to pardon him.

The Supreme Court’s ruling may not be surprising. The Supreme Court may wish to avoid controversy in giving Wang a retrial after a September 2024 Constitutional Court ruling that narrowed the scope of capital punishment but did not outlaw it.

The ruling narrowed the use of capital punishment to all but the most extraordinary cases. Capital punishment was maintained as constitutional, but the use of the death penalty was to be decided on the basis of factors such as severity of the crime, motive, and amount of injury inflicted on victims.

Nevertheless, as a means of attacking the DPP, the KMT was quick to frame the Constitutional Court ruling as a de facto abolition of capital punishment. New Taipei mayor Hou You-yi, for example, a former police officer, criticized the apparent disregard for justice for victims in the ruling, while public figures such as singer Pai Bing-bing, an advocate for the use of the death penalty after the murder of her daughter in 1997, called for the execution of all of Taiwan’s 37 individuals on death row.

Poll after poll, whether conducted by civil society groups opposed to capital punishment or groups in favor of it, show that Taiwanese society overwhelmingly supports the use of the death penalty, presumably with the view that it offers a social deterrent to violent crimes. The pan-Blue camp often suggests that without the use of capital punishment, society will go to pieces without the fear of punishment as a means of keeping violent criminals in line.

Given such pressure from the opposition, even as the DPP is thought to be internally divided on the issue of capital punishment, DPP presidents have sometimes carried out executions shortly before elections as a means of shoring up support–and demonstrating that they, too, are not against the death penalty. Capital punishment continues to be a wedge issue in Taiwanese politics, and many longstanding cases in which individuals have been framed of crimes they did not commit may not be resolved within their lifetimes.

Perhaps this is one of the ways in which issues regarding capital punishment in Taiwan stem from authoritarian attitudes that remain pervasive in society even after democratization, as legalistic views in society persist. Abolition of the death penalty is, in this sense, an issue that is rooted in transitional justice in Taiwan.

Source: newbloommag.net, Brian Hioe, March 23, 2026

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

— Oscar Wilde

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