Former National Science Council official Shieh Ching-jyh (謝清志), who was acquitted of corruption charges after a five-and-a-half-year judicial ordeal, said he was neither surprised nor happy at the court ruling declaring him innocent and called for the judicial system to avoid becoming a tool for political administrations.
Shieh made the remarks in an interview with the Chinese-language Liberty Times (the Taipei Times’ sister paper) on Friday.
Shieh in December 2006 was indicted on corruption charges for allegedly collaborating with a private company to profit from a construction project. He was accused of helping his friend, Hsu Hung-chang (許鴻章), win a contract for a construction project in an industrial park in Tainan to reduce vibrations from the high-speed rail (HSR) affecting the park. The project was initiated to address the concerns of high-tech companies in an industrial zone next to the railway track who feared that tremors from passing trains could damage their products.
Photo: Huang Chien-hua, Taipei Times
Shieh was acquitted of all charges in the re-trial of the first trial held at the High Court’s Tainan branch on July 11, and on the basis of the Fair and Speedy Criminal Trials Act (刑事妥速審判法), the prosecutors decided not to appeal the ruling.
The act stipulates that unless the rulings of the first and second trials are against the law or unconstitutional, prosecutors have to abide by the first and second rulings if they are the same and may not appeal to the Supreme Court for a third trial.
Shieh said on Friday that the many earthquakes that have happened over the past six years have proved that the anti-vibration construction for the high-speed rail works.
Looking back, Shieh said that most of the companies in the park were worried the vibration of the high-speed trains would affect the quality of their products, with some even backing out of their leases and setting up in Singapore.
The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) had not taken care of the problem for seven years, so the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co had written to the National Science Council after the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) took over the presidency in 2000, Shieh said.
Shieh said that despite all the effort he had expended in the project, he was still accused of a crime that had not only seen him detained for 59 days, but also besmirched his name.
Shieh said he was thankful to all the family members and friends that had cared for and encouraged him while he had been imprisoned, adding that “in comparison to the people jailed for decades over the Kaohsiung Incident or former president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁), who is still behind bars, I’m pretty lucky.”
Born in Cigu District (七股), Greater Tainan, the 70 year-old Shieh received his PhD in aerospace engineering at the University of Michigan and had worked at the Rockwell Automation as a guidance and control analyst prior to his return to Taiwan.
After his return, Shieh became the nation’s main promoter of aerospace technology, presiding over the launch division when the Formosat-I satellite — formerly known as ROCSAT-1 — was launched in 1999 by Lockheed-Martin at Cape Canaveral Air Base, and was also on the planning committee for Formosat-3.
Speaking of the future, Shieh said he would retain the same hopes he had in 1995 when he returned to Taiwan: that Taiwan’s judiciary system would improve and there would be no more wrongful imprisonment.
Shieh added that he hoped the judicial system would not be relegated to the status of a tool that just serve whichever administration was in power.
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