The Taiwan High Prosecutors’ Office filed an appeal late on Tuesday of the High Court’s acquittal last month of the “Hsichih Trio.”
The prosecutors said the report produced by US forensic expert Henry Lee (李昌鈺) was “not evidence at all” and the entire acquittal ruling ran counter to laws and regulations.
The Nov. 12 acquittal was the second time the Taiwan High Court had cleared Su Chien-ho (蘇建和), Liu Bin-lang (劉秉郎) and Chuang Lin-hsun (莊林勳) of the murder of a Hsichih couple, Wu Min-han (吳銘漢) and Yeh Ying-lan (葉盈蘭), and rape of Yeh on March 24, 1991. The first acquittal was in 2003.
One of the key factors in the Nov. 12 ruling was Lee’s report, which concluded that based on the crime scene photographs and blood distribution, a single assailant could have committed the double murder and rape, as well as the fact that only one set of fingerprints was found and the lack of any forensic evidence linking the trio to the crimes.
Wang Wen-hsiao (王文孝), an army conscript, was executed on Jan. 11, 1992, after being convicted by a military court in the case.
Based on the crime scene photos, Lee said he did not rule out the possibility that Wang could have carried out the crimes alone.
There is also the fact that the trio’s confessions were coerced, the second acquittal report said.
However, the Taiwan High Prosecutors Office said Lee’s report, released in July last year, was compiled with data provided by the defendants’ lawyers that was seriously flawed and therefore should not be allowed to serve as evidence. It was also debatable whether the trio had been coerced into confessing, the prosecutors said.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
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