The resignation of minister of justice Wang Ching-feng (王清峰) on Thursday was an unfortunate incident, although one that was entirely necessary.
Wang, a human rights lawyer well-known for her opposition to capital punishment, had announced that she would not sign any execution orders. In effect, she placed her personal convictions above the law of the land, thus making her position untenable.
Her resignation, however, spotlights two weaknesses in the government’s approach to public policy. The first is that the administration is so preoccupied with the economy that it has let other policy issues slide. To a degree, this is understandable given the global financial crisis of the past two years. In addition, the government’s long-term plans are almost entirely focused on its ties with Beijing, including an economic cooperation framework agreement (ECFA). This, in effect, conjoins economic concerns with those of sovereignty, thereby creating a set of problems tailor-made to distract both the government and the public.
There are other issues that urgently need attention: jobs, education, the Constitution, environment, healthcare and an ageing population. Recent demographic studies have shown that the nation’s birth rate is the lowest in the world, so low in fact as to be unsustainable.
The death penalty aside, judicial reform has long been promised and is long overdue. Yet the government and media treat these important issues as an afterthought. Wang’s resignation reminds us that ignoring them comes at a price.
The second weakness has to do with the government’s approach to the death penalty itself. The Presidential Office has acknowledged that abolishing the death penalty is a global trend and promised to make an effort to phase it out. Interim steps taken include lengthening prison sentences for serious crimes, raising the parole threshold for life sentences, tightening procedures for issuing death sentences and dropping mandatory imposition.
Such measures are not enough and are indicative of a lack of leadership. Pai Ping-ping’s (白冰冰) impassioned plea on behalf of victims highlights the problem of such measures, namely, that in highly charged cases, blood-lust trumps legal process. Pai has every right to want revenge, as do others who have lost loved ones to crime. Indeed, the public is properly outraged by such acts and justified in demanding that perpetrators be punished before the law.
Whether or not to abolish capital punishment, however, is ultimately neither a humanitarian issue nor one of punishment; it is a question of justice. As former Illinois governor George Ryan put it when he declared a moratorium on the death penalty in 2000 and commuted the sentences of 167 inmates on the state’s death row: “I still believe the death penalty is a proper response to heinous crimes ... But I believe that it has to be where we don’t put innocent people to death.”
Ryan’s decision and that of others like him was based on the impossibility of ascertaining guilt. The problem of determining guilt has been highlighted over the last few decades because the introduction of DNA testing has resulted in the exoneration of hundreds of people in the US alone who were convicted of crimes. DNA has made unavoidable what has always been the case — accepting the fallibility of legal process.
Innocent people are routinely imprisoned or executed for crimes they did not commit. The reasons are many: flawed evidence, coercive interrogation, political interference and so forth. There have been numerous such cases in Taiwan. The Chiou Ho-shun case (邱和順) is now the nation’s longest-running criminal case and one of the most controversial. Several police officers have already been convicted of coercively extracting confessions and perjury in the case, yet despite serious doubts as to their guilt, Chiou Ho-shun and co-defendents Lin Kun-ming (林坤明) and Wu Shu-chen (吳淑貞) remain imprisoned, Chiou on death row.
The legal process is easily sidetracked by highly emotive cases and political expediency. Whatever pragmatic measures are adopted, as long as the death penalty remains on the books, it is only a matter of time until someone is executed — whether they are truly guilty or not.
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