Scheduled to die at 9pm, Huang Lin-kai (黃麟凱) was instead executed at 10pm on Jan. 16. The media put the story in their news cycle and fanned it into a firestorm, repeating the gory details over and over. That is typical. The story is riveting, keeping many Taiwanese glued to its twists and turns.
Huang was on death row for more than a decade. His crime was particularly vicious: He was found guilty of murdering his ex-girlfriend and her mother. His appeals had all failed as the courts believed his crime was categorized as being the most serious and deserved the ultimate punishment which, as per Taiwan’s practice, was a shot through the heart.
For decades, Taiwan has been balancing its democratic values with a past in which the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) regime heavily relied on summary executions to maintain its authoritarian rule for more than four decades. Thus, the issue of the death penalty and its abolition has been a particularly vexing one, as Taiwan proclaims itself to be a democratic country unlike its larger authoritarian neighbor, which has executed an estimated average of 2,000 people annually since 2013.
Despite the obvious differences between the two countries, the death penalty is seen as being central to the social cohesion of Taiwan. Academics say that criminal penalties maintain the boundaries of what is acceptable within society. That became evident when a Ministry of Justice spokesperson said that not only did the death penalty “protect” human rights, it also ensured social justice.
Many civil society organizations responded by saying that many of the protections listed in a Constitutional Court’s ruling issued last year were ignored, and that the remaining death row inmates were in danger of also being executed. Their message fell on deaf ears as a quick glance of the messages left on the Taiwan Alliance to End the Death Penalty’s Facebook account reveals the vitriol thrown at them, accusing them of being pro-crime and supporting murderers.
That offers an important look into the attitudes many in Taiwan have toward the death penalty. Therefore it was unsurprising that President William Lai (賴清德) was “ambushed” by a reporter who asked him if the execution was due to his alleged dwindling popularity. That was a reminder of the spate of executions during the administration of former president Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) when his popularity was only at 9 percent.
In the first few years of former Indonesian president Joko Widodo’s administration, many activists took aim at a slew of execution orders he had signed. They said he had signed them to bolster his image as a bold leader standing up to foreign countries even as they criticized his decision. The same can also be said of former Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte when he swept into power on an anti-crime platform promising to “neutralize” drug dealers. At the end of his tenure, more than 30,000 were dead.
Such punitive measures, especially the death penalty, ostensibly symbolize justice in a society, but nevertheless remain inherently political. When the Constitutional Court retained the death penalty with stricter safeguards, KMT Chairman Eric Chu (朱立倫) said that the Democratic Progressive Party-led government had in “practice” abolished it. Defending the death penalty would allow the KMT to appear as a party of “values,” arguing that executing criminals is the only way to protect society from a dangerous world. Thus public discourse on the matter has narrowed as political parties and the media continue to use divisiveness and emotional rhetoric to score points among their supporters.
The Internet is no better, dominated by trolls and keyboard warriors. Amid the noise, what remains unheard are the voices of not only the victims, but also of the families of those on death row. Families of victims undergo complex emotional processes, and the death penalty might not always allow them to achieve “closure.” Therefore the sentences are less for the families’ benefit than they are for the state to showcase its power and to sate the public’s need for blood.
Executions also create victims among the family of those convicted. They suffer from remorse, but also intense scrutiny from the media and the anonymous masses online. The families have also lost a loved one.
The complexity of the effects of an act of violence cannot be easily understood by wider society. The pain felt by individual families are intense, complex, multifaceted and can never easily fit into a punitive notion of justice. That is the simple vision delivered by vengeance seeking self-interested politicians and media outlets. What we need to start asking is what is the impact of using violence to deal with crime. What we also need to begin asking is whether vengeance is ever truly the answer.
Leong Kar Yen is an associate professor at National Chung Cheng University and serves on the editorial board of the Taiwan Human Rights Journal.
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