Representatives from Amnesty International and the Judicial Reform Foundation yesterday called for a retrial for death-row inmate Chiu Ho-shun (邱和順), saying the state might execute an innocent man falsely convicted of murder.
Chiu, 55, has been on death row since 1989 after being sentenced to death for robbery, kidnapping and murder despite several retrials.
“This case has long been a stain on Taiwan’s judicial system and the High Court now has the opportunity to right this wrong,” Amnesty International East Asia research director Roseann Rife said in a statement, citing a “serious miscarriage of justice” in Chiu’s case.
Photo: CNA
“This is one of Taiwan’s most protracted criminal cases, with repeated appeals over the past three decades, in which parts of [Chiu’s] forced confession have continued to be permitted as evidence in court. No material evidence linking Chiu to the crimes has ever been presented,” the statement said.
A retired policeman surnamed Wu (吳) attended yesterday’s rally in front of the Ministry of Justice in Taipei.
“Chiu is innocent. He signed the confession after being tortured. I want to let the public know the truth about this case, because I cannot bear to see a man wrongfully executed,” Wu said.
Wu said he escorted Chiu to interrogations in 1988, and, although he did not witness the torture, Wu said he heard Chiu cry out in agony from some form of beating, adding that is willing to appear court, if called upon to testify.
Two other defendants who served prison terms in the case, Lin Kun-ming (林坤明) and Lin Hsin-chun (林信純) attended the rally.
Both men proclaimed their and Chiu’s innocence in the case. Chiu was alleged to be the mastermind of a 12-person group that kidnapped two people for ransom in 1987, which resulted in the death of the two victims.
Foundation executive secretary Hsiao Yi-ming (蕭逸民) said there was another retired policeman, who was also involved in transferring Chiu from his cell to the interrogations, willing to testify, and that, based on new testimony from the police officers, Chiu’s lawyers can file a motion for a retrial.
Throughout the lengthy trials, defense lawyers and legal reform groups have maintained that convictions for at least six of the alleged group members relied on confessions extracted under duress, and that concrete material evidence was lacking in Chiu’s and other convictions.
According to Amnesty International, the interrogations lasted up to 10 hours at a time, where five or six people beat Chiu to unconsciousness. Chiu described being blindfolded, tied up, forced to sit on ice, subjected to electric shocks with an electric baton and having water mixed with pepper poured into his mouth and nose during questioning.
Hsiao said two investigative reports by the Control Yuan in recent years called for the prosecutor-general to launch an extraordinary appeal, citing numerous contradictions between the confessions and available evidence, numerous breaches of the judicial process and Chiu’s time on death row and in detention.
The case received international attention in 2011 after the death sentence was upheld by the Supreme Court in July 2011, with Amnesty International initiating a global urgent action campaign to appeal for Chiu.
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
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
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