Report faults death row conviction

The nation's watchdog said yesterday that the conviction of death row inmate Hsu Tzu-chiang (徐自強) was unlawful.

The Control Yuan also said it would request the State Public Prosecutor General to make an extraordinary appeal on Hsu's behalf.

But the Ministry of Justice said yesterday that it had not yet received official documents relating to the case from the Control Yuan.

Hsu, 31, was sentenced to death for kidnapping and murder in 1995.

The officiating Control Yuan committee, in a report released yesterday, stated that the conviction of Hsu was based on insufficient evidence. Hsu's conviction relied on the testimonies of two "accomplices" which, the report said, were highly unreliable -- a point also argued by Hsu's family and human rights activists.

The Supreme Court confirmed Hsu's conviction on April 27 this year. The Control Yuan committee, however, listed seven points which it said indicated that the prosecution and the courts had dealt with the case in a manner that defied logic and breached the rules of evidence.

First, the report says, two others convicted in the same case -- Huang Chun-chi (黃春棋) and Chen Yi-lung (陳憶龍) -- told the prosecution they had been tortured by the police, but the prosecution had not investigated whether the claims were true.

In addition, while Huang and Chen both pleaded guilty and incriminated Hsu, Hsu himself had insisted he was innocent at every stage of the legal process.

Second, the Control Yuan said the courts had wrongly presumed that because Hsu had rented the vehicle used in the kidnapping, he had been involved in the crime.

Hsu had argued that although he rented the car in his name, he then lent it to his friend, Huang, but had no idea what Huang did with it.

The Control Yuan said it seemed unlikely that Hsu would have rented the car in person, using his own identity card, if he had known about the criminal plan.

Also, the court had rejected Hsu's alibi merely on the basis of the testimonies of Huang and Hsu, without carefully examining many facts which conflicted with their testimonies, the report said.

The courts also failed to respond to Hsu's petition to summon a witness to corroborate his alibi, the Control Yuan report says.

The Control Yuan's investigation into the Hsu case began in May, following a campaign by the Judicial Reform Foundation (民間司法改革基金會), a human rights group.

The head of the three-member committee investigating the case, Chiang Peng-chien (江鵬堅), the DPP's first chairman, died of pancreatic cancer on Dec. 15.

The Control Yuan can impeach public officials but it cannot overturn court rulings.

Human rights campaigners have said they believe the Ministry of Justice would have to halt Hsu's execution if the Control Yuan found the conviction unlawful.