Think about the victims
I would like to respond to Michael Tsai’s letter (Letters, March 14, page 8) on the death penalty. It is filled with fallacious arguments and incredible insensitivity.
First, as is customary, he assures us that he empathizes “with families who have suffered great pain,” as if a few empty words are at all helpful to families devastated and destroyed by murderers. Does he think his empty words are any consolation? Instead of concentrating his letter on the victims, he spends most of his time trying to protect killers from rightful execution resulting from a sentence passed by the judicial system, as well as ignoring the wishes of the people of Taiwan, who support capital punishment in overwhelming numbers (over 70 percent). But then, democracy and the rule of law can be so inconvenient when they don’t match Tsai’s ideas.
Tsai trots out the old argument about “an eye for an eye” taken from the Old Testament, which he clearly does not understand. The phrase which he considers to be so inhumane is actually meant to protect people. It does not mean that if someone takes your eye, he must lose an eye, as Tsai erroneously believes. It means that an eye is the limit; you cannot take someone’s life for an eye. It was a very humane concept to prevent people from escalating punishment in revenge. He continues: “It goes without saying that life is precious.” Well, why does he say it then?
He focuses on the life of criminals, murderers who didn’t share Tsai’s enlightened viewpoint. They took life and thereby forfeited their sacred right to life. The people of Taiwan understand this very clearly and do not need the writer to civilize them.
Tsai then asks if executing murderers will “truly heal wounds?” This is a specious question. One could equally ask: Should families who have lost a loved one to a cold-blooded killer have to live with the knowledge that the guilty killer is alive while the innocent victim is dead? Tsai raises another misleading argument that execution is not a deterrent. Could that be because so few murderers are executed and that it takes so long that the public forgets? He prefers “solitary confinement for life” as a “humane” alternative. Tsai is incredibly naive to believe this.
If he knew anything about his humane solution, he would never have offered it. Several years ago, prisoners in Italy serving life sentences pleaded to be executed, as they considered their endless incarceration to be too inhumane. Do the hardworking taxpayers of Taiwan want to support killers for a lifetime in prison with all its attendant costs? I think not.
CHAIM MELAMED
Pingtung
Taiwan bound by law
Thank you for your editorial on the dangers of executing the innocent (“Opinions differ on death penalty,” March 15, page 8).
Hsu Wun-pin (許文彬) seems to think that as long as the death penalty system ensures no innocent people will be executed, nobody will object to the existence of the penalty itself. This is wrong.
Many people, including myself and members of the Alliance to End the Death Penalty, do object to the idea of the state using death as a means of punishment. The goal of perfecting the system to avoid all mistakes is a path many US states have taken, resulting in the costs of capital punishment cases far exceeding the cost of lifetime imprisonment. Yet, even with all these expensive legal safeguards, human beings, including judges, may err.
Second, in defense of former minister of justice Wang Ching-feng (王清峰), it should be noted that her position has been public knowledge since she was first appointed. The president and the premier certainly knew her opinion and implicitly supported her. However, there was an immediate threat to their political careers after Wang made her comments and so they turned their backs on her. She deserves to be congratulated for her courage and clear principles.
EDMUND RYDEN
Sinjhuang
The conflict in the Middle East has been disrupting financial markets, raising concerns about rising inflationary pressures and global economic growth. One market that some investors are particularly worried about has not been heavily covered in the news: the private credit market. Even before the joint US-Israeli attacks on Iran on Feb. 28, global capital markets had faced growing structural pressure — the deteriorating funding conditions in the private credit market. The private credit market is where companies borrow funds directly from nonbank financial institutions such as asset management companies, insurance companies and private lending platforms. Its popularity has risen since
The Donald Trump administration’s approach to China broadly, and to cross-Strait relations in particular, remains a conundrum. The 2025 US National Security Strategy prioritized the defense of Taiwan in a way that surprised some observers of the Trump administration: “Deterring a conflict over Taiwan, ideally by preserving military overmatch, is a priority.” Two months later, Taiwan went entirely unmentioned in the US National Defense Strategy, as did military overmatch vis-a-vis China, giving renewed cause for concern. How to interpret these varying statements remains an open question. In both documents, the Indo-Pacific is listed as a second priority behind homeland defense and
Every analyst watching Iran’s succession crisis is asking who would replace supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Yet, the real question is whether China has learned enough from the Persian Gulf to survive a war over Taiwan. Beijing purchases roughly 90 percent of Iran’s exported crude — some 1.61 million barrels per day last year — and holds a US$400 billion, 25-year cooperation agreement binding it to Tehran’s stability. However, this is not simply the story of a patron protecting an investment. China has spent years engineering a sanctions-evasion architecture that was never really about Iran — it was about Taiwan. The
In an op-ed published in Foreign Affairs on Tuesday, Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) said that Taiwan should not have to choose between aligning with Beijing or Washington, and advocated for cooperation with Beijing under the so-called “1992 consensus” as a form of “strategic ambiguity.” However, Cheng has either misunderstood the geopolitical reality and chosen appeasement, or is trying to fool an international audience with her doublespeak; nonetheless, it risks sending the wrong message to Taiwan’s democratic allies and partners. Cheng stressed that “Taiwan does not have to choose,” as while Beijing and Washington compete, Taiwan is strongest when
RSS