The Judicial Reform Foundation (
"Three US human right activists who will come to Taiwan next week for a seminar have agreed to help by meeting with either President Chen Shui-bian (
Lin's remarks were referred to the International Conference on Legal Culture and Strategies for Abolition of the Death Penalty at Fu-jen University on May 15.
University of Florida sociologist Michael Radelet, Georgetown University law professor Richard Dieter and Peter Hodgkinson, Center for Capital Punishment Studies director at the UK's University of Westminster were invited to speak at the conference.
Regarding Hsu's case, the Supreme Court rejected State Public Prosecutor-General Lu Jen-fa's (
Hsu's case has been handled by defense counsels Joseph Lin (
Lin said the foundation filed a petition letter for Chen Ding-nan on Friday and tried to buy some time by asking the minister to postpone his approval to carry out Hsu's death penalty.
"We have no idea when Lu filed his fourth extraordinary appeal on behalf of Hsu. But since Lu decided to do so, that was a sign that he was also worried that there are uncertain grey areas in this case, so we should not execute a suspect before these grey areas are cleared up," said Shirley Lin.
In addition to the petition letter, she said that the three defense counsels have also filed a request to the Taiwan High Court for an extraordinary retrial as well as an application for a Constitutional interpretation article to the Council of Grand Justices. Neither request had been answered as of press time yesterday.
Hsu's conviction was handed down by the Supreme Court on April 27, 2000. The foundation had petitioned Lu to pursue an extraordinary appeal for Hsu four times. Lu finally approved the fifth petition to make the first extraordinary appeal in 2001 but that appeal was rejected by the Supreme Court on March 21, 2002.
The foundation's petitions cited a Control Yuan investigation report released in January 2001 that concluded Hsu's conviction was flawed and unlawful. In the report, the Control Yuan also suggested Lu make extraordinary appeals for Hsu.
Hsu was indicted for the Sept. 1, 1995, kidnapping and murder of Huang Chun-shu (
In handing down the verdict, the court said that Huang Chun-shu was kidnapped and the accomplices demanded NT$15 million in ransom. The victim was killed on the same day in Hsichih, Taipei County, and the three accomplices failed to get away with the money.
In May 2000, Chen Yi-lung wrote a confession admitting that he had deliberately incriminated Hsu because he had a grudge against him and hoped to delay the trial.
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