As it turns out, the Ministry of National Defense’s Military Security Brigade was the mastermind behind the military police operation that detained a civilian, put him in a van and searched his home without a warrant.
The unit was previously known as the Counterintelligence Brigade, which interrogated and tortured Chiang Kuo-ching (江國慶), an airman executed for the rape and murder of a girl in 1997 who was posthumously acquitted in 2011.
Although officers in this unit are soldiers, they are not military police officers, nor are they judicial police officers.
As long as no one looks into matters like this, history will keep repeating itself. When the girl was raped and killed, then-minister of national defense Chen Chao-min (陳肇敏) convened a special meeting on the case and instructed the Counterintelligence Brigade to handle the investigation.
The brigade used on Chiang the means they applied to make suspected spies talk.
It did not take long for them to break Chiang’s spirit and he knelt down to apologize and confess to the murder.
With that confession, he landed himself a death sentence.
These illegal investigative methods were denounced long ago by the Control Yuan in its corrective measures reports. Apparently the ministry did not take this seriously, since it keeps doing what it has been doing.
The root cause lies in the incomplete implementation of transitional justice and the systemic failure of the supervisory mechanism.
Initially, the public thought that the military police had abused their powers, and their role became the target of much criticism.
Some people were of the opinion that the Judicial Police Dispatching Act (調度司法警察條例) should be nullified and the military police should be stripped of their judicial police powers and be disallowed to work on non-military criminal cases.
Theoretically, there are advantages and disadvantages to both sides of the argument. In fact, the number of investigations conducted by military police on non-military cases has been decreasing.
The main responsibility for preventing the abuse of power lies with prosecutors and judges. As long as prosecutors are not deliberately precluded from the investigative process, judges can exercise their power to ensure that the law is stringently upheld when they issue an order to summon, arrest or detain individuals. Whether the military police should take on the role of judicial police would then be less significant.
In fact, the root of the problem is that all branches of police are abusing their power, whether they are military police or otherwise. When the police investigate a case, they often do not follow procedure, but do what is convenient, abuse consent-to-search forms — which should be used only in extraordinary circumstances — and ignore the requirement to obtain a warrant before mounting a search.
However, just because that is what the police do, it does not make it justifiable for the military police to do the same.
It is not only essential for the military police and judicial police to understand that all officers must abide by the Code of Criminal Procedure (刑事訴訟法), but it is also important that prosecutors and judges fulfill their responsibilities if abuse of power is to be prevented.
Preventing abuses of power is the responsibility of prosecutors, but sometimes prosecutors are so eager to solve a case that they turn a blind eye to irregularities, believing: “So long as we can find evidence against you, you are not being wronged.”
This is the mentality shared by both prosecutors and judges, who usually apply a loose standard on the validity of a consent-to-search form: As long as it is signed, it does not matter whether the judicial police used coercion, made bargains or told lies to get it.
With a consent form signed, everything automatically becomes legal and no one takes the trouble to hold officers who have abused their power responsible.
Spoiled, the judicial police naturally developed a “just do it” mentality, thinking: “We will just break in and search. As long as we can find the evidence, we are OK. Even if we cannot find anything, as long as we can make them sign the consent form, we are off the hook.”
If judges continue to maintain the attitude of doing what is convenient, unlawful procedures will never be corrected.
As a matter of fact, this mentality has its roots in the authoritarian era in which all branches of the government were like one big family.
The Military Security Brigade is also a member of this family, so they could ask the military police to carry out operations. With orders coming from high-ranking officers, the Counterintelligence Brigade could not be more relentless in torturing a soldier to get what it wanted. Even if something went wrong, the prosecutors would continue to delay the investigation and the scandal would sooner or later become yesterday’s news.
That is how Chen got off the hook.
If the state apparatus and key personnel remain unchanged and the old system untouched, this system will continue to cause injustice.
That is precisely why the nation needs a thorough implementation of transitional justice.
Kao Jung-chih is a lawyer and executive director of the Judicial Reform Foundation.
Translated by Ethan Zhan
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