Judicial Yuan presidential nominee Hsieh Wen-ting (謝文定) yesterday denied accusations that he was a prosecutor in charge of multiple controversial cases during the White Terror era, saying that his involvement was limited to “assisting with those investigations.”
Hsieh was accused by 18 judicial reform groups led by the Alliance for Civic Oversight of Supreme Court Justice Nominees and the Judicial Reform Foundation of being the lead prosecutor in multiple White Terror era legal cases that some consider to epitomize human rights violations by the then-authoritarian administration.
The cases included the Jhongli Incident, the Kaohsiung Incident and the murders of relatives of democracy activist Lin I-hsiung (林義雄).
Photo: Chu Pei-hsiung, Taipei Times
The Jhongli Incident refers to a mass demonstration in 1977 against ballot-rigging by the government in a county commissioner election, and the Kaohsiung Incident, or the Formosa Magazine Incident, refers to a clash between security forces and democracy activists in 1979.
Lin, an organizer of the Kaohsiung protest and later a Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) chairman, was in 1980 convicted of treason for his role in the clash.
That same year, his mother and twin daughters were stabbed to death in mysterious circumstances. Although the then-government was widely believed to be responsible for the murders, they remain unsolved.
Earlier yesterday, the groups alleged that Hsieh had wilfully concealed his role in those cases in the resume he submitted to the legislature and demanded that President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) rescind the nomination, or for the legislature to refuse to vote for his confirmation if she was unable or unwilling to do so.
Alliance convenor Chiu Hei-yuan (瞿海源) said that the nomination of Hsieh by Tsai was procedurally “the most slap-dash job we have seen since the founding of our organization in 2003,” and that Tsai had “bypassed” the evaluation committee for the nomination.
The scheduled confirmation in an extempore legislative session would make “objective evaluation of the nominee impossible,” Chiu said.
In a statement issued on the same day, Hsieh said that the prosecutor assigned to the Jhongli Incident with the surname Liu (劉) had a schedule conflict and that Hsieh was ordered to replace Liu as the acting prosecutor.
Hsieh said that during the Kaohsiung Incident, he was ordered to assist the assigned prosecutor, surnamed Sun (孫), by interrogating “several” defendants, on account of “the sheer number of accused.”
In the case of the murder of Lin’s daughters and mother, Hsieh said that he was under orders by the then-head prosecutor of the Taipei District Prosecutors’ Office to assist Sun by investigating Bruce Jacobs, a US professor under suspicion at the time, whom he eventually cleared as a suspect.
“I am known for handling all of my cases according to an attorney’s conscience all of my career,” he said.
Presidential Office spokesman Alex Huang (黃重諺) yesterday issued a statement saying that Tsai was aware of Hsieh’s role in those cases, adding that during the previous DPP administration of former president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁), former minister of justice Chen Ding-nan (陳定南) named Hsieh as a deputy minister and Chen Shui-bian nominated him as the Supreme Prosecutors’ Office secretary-general.
Additional reporting by Chung Li-hua
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