Last Thursday an extraordinary appeal filed on behalf of death-row inmate Hsu Tzu-chiang (
The late US Supreme Court justice William J. Brennan once said that "perhaps the bleakest fact of all is that the death penalty is imposed not only in a freakish and discriminatory manner, but also in some cases upon defendants who are actually innocent." Brennan also said that capital punishment's fatal flaw is that it treats people as objects to be toyed with and discarded. While opponents and proponents of capital punishment will probably never reach a consensus on whether the death penalty constitutes cruel and inhumane punishment, they do agree on the inherent wrong, if not evil, of executing the innocent.
In fact, no issue presented by capital punishment is more disturbing to the public than the prospect that innocent people might be executed because of errors in the investigations and the trial process. It is at odds with the most fundamental criminal justice concept, namely, that punishment must be handed out based on culpability. The deterrence factor of capital punishment fails each time an innocent person is wrongfully executed.
Unfortunately, the possibility of such events happening are not rare, in Taiwan, China, the US or the handful of other nations that retain the death penalty. The growing number of people in the US exonerated after being convicted and sentenced to death should be enough to give anyone pause. American Civil Liberties Union statistics show that almost 100 people have been released from death row in the US as of last month because their convictions were overturned. Many of those people were freed as a result of the work of the Innocence Project at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, a non-profit legal clinic. The project has found that some of the most common factors leading to wrongful convictions are mistaken identification, prosecutorial or police misconduct, bad lawyering, false confessions and false witness testimony.
Hsu was convicted of a 1995 kidnapping and murder based on the confessions of two alleged accomplices. One of those men admitted in 2000 that he had incriminated Hsu simply because he had a grudge against him. The unreliability of confessions obtained by police in Taiwan, who are notorious for using physical and psychological coercion to obtain the results they desire, goes without saying. Taiwan's legal code, in fact, prohibits conviction based solely on confessions.
The long-running efforts to reverse the convictions of the Hsichih Trio are proof of the determination of many within Taiwan's legal system to avoid embarrassment by exposing judicial errors to public scrutiny. But what is the cost to society of preserving a system that executes inmates without a chance for their claims to be thoroughly and fairly examined? The Control Yuan's findings alone should have been enough impetus to win Hsu a retrial. The risk of an innocent person being executed is not one that people in Taiwan should be willing to take.
In their New York Times bestseller How Democracies Die, Harvard political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt said that democracies today “may die at the hands not of generals but of elected leaders. Many government efforts to subvert democracy are ‘legal,’ in the sense that they are approved by the legislature or accepted by the courts. They may even be portrayed as efforts to improve democracy — making the judiciary more efficient, combating corruption, or cleaning up the electoral process.” Moreover, the two authors observe that those who denounce such legal threats to democracy are often “dismissed as exaggerating or
The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus in the Legislative Yuan has made an internal decision to freeze NT$1.8 billion (US$54.7 million) of the indigenous submarine project’s NT$2 billion budget. This means that up to 90 percent of the budget cannot be utilized. It would only be accessible if the legislature agrees to lift the freeze sometime in the future. However, for Taiwan to construct its own submarines, it must rely on foreign support for several key pieces of equipment and technology. These foreign supporters would also be forced to endure significant pressure, infiltration and influence from Beijing. In other words,
“I compare the Communist Party to my mother,” sings a student at a boarding school in a Tibetan region of China’s Qinghai province. “If faith has a color,” others at a different school sing, “it would surely be Chinese red.” In a major story for the New York Times this month, Chris Buckley wrote about the forced placement of hundreds of thousands of Tibetan children in boarding schools, where many suffer physical and psychological abuse. Separating these children from their families, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) aims to substitute itself for their parents and for their religion. Buckley’s reporting is
Last week, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), together holding more than half of the legislative seats, cut about NT$94 billion (US$2.85 billion) from the yearly budget. The cuts include 60 percent of the government’s advertising budget, 10 percent of administrative expenses, 3 percent of the military budget, and 60 percent of the international travel, overseas education and training allowances. In addition, the two parties have proposed freezing the budgets of many ministries and departments, including NT$1.8 billion from the Ministry of National Defense’s Indigenous Defense Submarine program — 90 percent of the program’s proposed
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