The Council of Grand Justices has rejected a petition for a constitutional interpretation filed by Tainan Council Speaker Lee Chuan-chiao (李全教), dashing Lee’s attempts to overturn last month’s guilty verdict by a local court on vote-buying charges, and he is likely to be stripped of his post.
The Council of Grand Justices said Lee’s petition did not present concrete evidence that a clause regarding conflicts of interest for judges in the Code of Civil Procedure (民事訴訟法) contravened the Constitution, so it did not qualify for a constitutional interpretation.
Lee, a member of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), was accused of buying votes from fellow councilors in the Dec. 25, 2014, speakership election.
Photo: Hung Jui-chin, Taipei Times
The Tainan District Court on April 22 found him guilty of vote-buying, sentencing him to a four-year prison term and a five-year deprivation of civic rights.
Lee said in his petition that one of the judges on the court’s collegiate bench was Wang San-ho (王參和), the husband of Tsai Li-yi (蔡麗宜), a superior of the prosecutor who filed the vote-buying charges.
“Since Tsai had a supervisory position and had authority over prosecutors at the Tainan District Prosecutors’ Office and because Wang and Tsai were husband and wife, Wang should not have presided over the case to avoid a conflict of interest and prejudice in the decisionmaking process,” Lee said.
The petition requested a constitutional interpretation of the affected clause because there is no definition of conflict of interest regarding situations of “effective work supervision and authority” stipulating judges must refrain from presiding over such cases.
Legal experts said that Tsai at the time was spokesperson for the Tainan District Prosecutors’ Office and that she was not the prosecutor handling Lee’s case, and therefore the law does not stipulate a conflict of interest and there is no such precedent in the nation’s judiciary.
They also said that in legal circles, there are numerous spouses working as court judges, prosecutors and other judiciary officials.
There have been cases in which the prosecutor and judge were married, but when an indictment was brought, most of the time the judge cited a conflict of interest and refrained from presiding over the case.
The legislature on Friday passed amendments to the Local Government Act (地方制度法) requiring speakers and deputy speakers of local councils to be elected by open ballot.
The amendment was widely considered the “Lee Chuan-chiao clause,” due to the prominence of the vote-buying allegations and charges against Lee.
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