Judicial Reform Foundation executive director Lin Feng-cheng (林峰正) and lawyers representing Chiou Ho-shun (邱和順), who was sentenced to death late last month for murder, said they would seek an extraordinary appeal and request a retrial.
The Supreme Court ignored the fact that police used torture to extract the confessions used to convict Chiou to end the longest-running legal battle in history, judicial reform advocates and lawyers told a press conference yesterday.
The court ruled on July 28 that Chiou, who has been detained for most of his adult life, received a fair trial and deserved to die for the 1987 slaying of Lu Cheng (陸正), a boy that prosecutors said he kidnapped, dismembered and then threw in the ocean after a botched kidnapping. The ruling brought an end to a 24-year-long case.
Chiou was also found guilty and was sentenced to death for the robbery and murder of Ko Hung Yu-lan (柯洪玉蘭), an insurance agent.
Sam Zarifi, director of Amnesty International’s Asia-Pacific program, sent a letter to Prosecutor-General Huang Shi-ming (黃世銘) on Wednesday, urging authorities to halt the execution of Chiou and order a retrial with fair proceedings in line with international standards.
To prove that Chiou had been tortured, the activists played audio recordings at the press conference of two policemen talking about the torture and showed video clips of Chiou wearing only underwear.
“The material was disclosed to the public now for the first time, because the foundation did not want to offend the victim’s family in the past,” Lin said.
The law states that forced confessions extracted through torture cannot be used as evidence to convict defendants, nor should they be the sole source of evidence for a legal judgement, Lin said.
There is enough evidence in both cases to prove Chiou’s innocence, lawyer Yu Poh-hsiang (尤伯祥) said. Two prosecutors and 10 police officers involved in Lu’s case were impeached by the Control Yuan in 1994 for using violence and threats to acquire speedy confessions, which were still accepted as evidence, Yu said.
Chiou had a car rental document on the day the kidnapping took place as an alibi, Yu said.
“Aren’t you hurt if your family was tortured? I will never give up on this case,” Yu said.
The flaw in both prosecutions was that Lu Cheng’s body and Ko’s skull and limbs were never found, which “should not have been the case if all defendants had admitted guilt because they should know where the bodies are,” lawyer Stephen Lee (李勝雄) said.
“My brother feels helpless that the judges refused to accept evidence submitted to the court which favors the defendants,” said Chiou Ruei-te (邱瑞得), Chiou’s elder brother.
Lu Cheng’s father, Lu Chin-te (陸晉德), said there was enough evidence to prove Chiou was guilty.
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:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching