Family sues over `white terror' death

Professors and presidential advisors who experienced the martial law period insist that the truth behind miscarriages of justice must be revealed and the government should apologize to and compensate victims.

Huang Chao-tang (黃昭堂), a presidential advisor and chairman of World United Formosans for Independence, said "The KMT government couldn't have persecuted so many people without help, and discovering the facts behind these cases would force those Taiwanese who helped the KMT government to face and admit what they did."

The government actually started work on redress for victims of miscarriages of justice during the martial law period when the Legislative Yuan passed a regulation providing for compensation in 1998. But the current administration has not taken up the matter.

Compensation had already been paid in 2,786 cases to the end of June this year. It requires the victim to have been interrogated and detained for at least one day.

Chen's case, however, doesn't qualify since he wasn't detained.

Huang criticized the criteria, saying, "Not only can Chen's case not be counted, there are a lot of victims who were just arrested and beaten without record. How can they be compensated?"

In 1994, the Control Yuan started a further investigation into Chen's death, but, concluding that the case was a criminal case, decided that it did not have the jurisdiction to investigate it and transferred it to the Ministry of Justice.

"From the investigation, we found a couple of suspicious points about his death, such as the body was found too close to the building from which he allegedly jumped, and his injuries didn't look like injuries resultant from a fall, as the postmortem report stated," said Chou Jung-yao (趙榮耀), a member of the Control Yuan committee which investigated the case.

"Investigation of these points, however, is a matter for a criminal investigation, which we didn't have the right to conduct," Chou said.

Hsieh Tsung-min (謝聰敏), an advisor to the president and the justice ministry -- and also a victim of the white terror -- said that the Control Yuan couldn't have discovered anything new without the right to conduct a criminal investigation.

"The Control Yuan can't really do a good job of an investigation without jurisdiction. The justice ministry is the organization that could investigate these unsolved cases, but as an advisor to the justice ministry, [I can tell you that] the ministry doesn't have the resources to investigate all of these cases.

"The victims and their families can take action through the judicial process, which I think is the best way," Hsieh said.